Mal Education - Motivation to Learn

Motivation.

Why are some of us motivated to learn, while others are not?
<ul>A survey might shed some light.</ul>

So I'll focus on me for a second - why am I motivated to learn?

Well, actually I'm not, at least not in general. But I am motivated to learn certain specific things. For some reason I am interested in physics and electronics and mechanical devices and mathematics. There are other things that interest me (biology for one), so this is just an example for the sake of discussion.

But there are other things that have never interested me. And some in-between things.

I enjoy learning about things if I am interested in them. I find it easy to add new facts and new skills to my stockpile when they relate to an interest area.

I find it difficult, sometimes impossible, to add new facts and skills that relate to things I'm not interested in.

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I presume that this is the case for everyone else, but in fact I've never asked.

???,
LB

My experience suggests that those who tend to NOT LEARN are simply NOT INTERESTED.

But can anyone truly be not interested in almost everything? My intuition tells me this is unlikely.

So the obvious theory generated by generalizing from my experience - motivation to learn a subject is a result of interest in that subject - seems on the surface to be at best incomplete.

LB

<b>LB: I find it difficult, sometimes impossible, to add new facts and skills that relate to things I'm not interested in. </b>

Yea! A soul mate!

This is certainly true of me, my older son and two of my grandsons. My younger son and my daughter don't seem to be as much afflicted. They seem to be able to apply themselves to un-interesting material and do relatively well learning it.

I think (whatever that means) that at least 80 % of the classroom time in the educational system is devoted to getting students to "learn" stuff they find not-interesting.

If this is true, then the purpose of the goal-discovery tool will be to enable users to discover topics that are, or could be, of interest to themselves.

And this is why I visualize the Hyper School as a place where the student decides what to study.

The "tool" you talk about sounds a lot like a protocol that tracks every detail of what a student has chosen to learn on their own, flags the gaps in what a student needs to know to "graduate" (sure need a definition here) and guides the student toward the missing ingredients.

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But once again - the market place already provides products and services that are close to this.

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We do not need to invent them. Maybe we could do better than others have. Probably we could. That's not the point.


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The kids need something they aren't getting.

The something they need already exists, at least in part. Could it be better? Sure. And it will.

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For some reason, the kids are not getting this thing they need.

Why?

<b>[shando] "My younger son and my daughter don't seem to be as much afflicted. They seem to be able to apply themselves to un-interesting material and do relatively well learning it.
"</b><ul>[LB]"So the obvious theory ... seems on the surface to be at best incomplete."</ul>
Thanks for confirming my intuition. For providing some evidence that I am at least in the ball park.

As I think about this and my previous post, I sense that I'm drifting back toward the system design topic. Only, the system now is bigger than the hypothetical Hyper Schools. Maybe it's even bigger than the entire educational infrastructure including 'non standard' products and services like games and search engines.

I hope I'm wrong.