Humans are born intrinsically motivated, but learn to become extrinsically motivated
Summary
- Humans are born wanting to learn for the sake of learning. But school teaches external motivations such as grades and punishment
Details
- kids learn and are interested in everything naturally for the joy of learning
References
Quotes
From a tender age society encourages us to lay aside our impetus to do things for their own sake (‘intrinsic’ motivation), and to instead do much of what we do for external reasons. As a young child you were almost certainly an intrinsically-motivated learner, and spent most of your waking hours fascinated by the world, and inventing endless adventures in pursuit of discovering how it all worked. Soon however, schooling converted learning into something you did for external motivations: grades, rewards and punishments.
Related
- learning
- Extrinsic motivation vs Intrinsic motivation
- Three keys to motivation - Daniel Pink
- Traditional schooling methods induce passivity in learning
- Learning never exhausts the mind - Leonardo da Vinci
- Learning is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge even if it means doing badly in the short term