6

Interlude

A Final Theory, Knowledge and Intelligence, and a Statement of Belief

Credo — The Human Motivation To Learn

The single fact of human psychology that most strongly guides me in my daily professional work is this: We’re learners. It’s what we’re especially designed for. It’s what we’re built to do best. The reason we have these big wobbly heads instead of nice, sleek ones is so we can think and learn better. The reason we tolerate these big heads that make birthing so difficult and dangerous for us is because it has paid survival dividends so far. We are still hunters and gatherers — of information.

When you give an infant or a toddler an interesting new object, what does he do? She explores it. He looks at it, listens to it, touches it, tastes it, turns it, hits it, drops it.... Long before language is in place, you can already hear her questions: What is this thing? What’s it good for? What can I do with it? How about if I try to....

• The process is self-starting. We don’t have to say “Here’s something new, perhaps you should explore it.” All we have to do is get out of the way!
• The process is self-reinforcing. We don’t have to say to a toddler “I’ll give you a treat if you sit down and check this out.” (If that very idea makes you laugh, as indeed it should, ask yourself: What happens between then and sixth grade homework assignments?)
• The process is self-guided. Whether the child chooses to explore the object now, how he explores it, how long he explores it, are in his control, not ours. (Think of all the stories of a child ignoring the new toy and exploring the box it came in.) When we try to guide exploration too strongly, it generally backfires. If we insist, it may thwart the whole desire to explore — at least for the moment. However, we can often guide an exploration, make it more effective, by using the object ourselves and modeling how we think it can be used. Our kids are typically interested in our ideas about something. But watch children with an open mind and you’ll see that they also want to explore it on their own terms. (A child hears the hum of a camera rewinding its film, grabs it, and pretends it’s Daddy’s electric razor. Who could argue with that?)
• The process should be life-long. When the desire fades, something is wrong. Humans want to learn — but they can be blocked.

Can you see the vital implications of this point of view? Successful parents always have some deep understanding of these implications. Unfortunately, the most frequent, and most devastating, learning problems come from a failure to understand and remember these simple facts about people. We’ll look more at those potential problems as we discuss motivation, and especially in the chapter on debugging problems.

For now, I just want to push forward the single idea:

Humans are born to be learners — it’s in our nature.

If you “get” everything else in this book, and you forget what you just read, you may as well forget the rest too, because it won’t work without this part. Because it is so important, let me see how many different ways I can phrase this absolutely vital point of view, and the implications that flow from it.

Kids learn because their brains are deeply structured to want and need to learn.

Kids will work with incredible persistence and application when they truly want to learn something.

With motivation, anything is possible; without it, nothing.

When something blocks learning, it itches and hurts.

The best motivation comes simply from the desire to learn. Other sources (love for you, desire to please you, threats, cash payments) may work for a while or to an extent. But they are weak at best, harmful at worst.

Fear is a lousy place to learn from.

If you teach your child because you’re afraid for her “if she doesn’t know this,” you’ll defeat your purpose.

If your child learns because he’s afraid — of you, teachers, the competitive world — he’ll learn only shallow surfaces, and forget soon.

The best motivation is intrinsic, not extrinsic — it comes from inside, not outside.

You don’t need to do anything to make your child want to learn. You only need to not make them want to not learn.

Kids usually have a great eye for what is worth learning — for them, right now.

When they don’t want to learn something, you can’t make them.

Motivation is a positive. you can’t get to it from negatives like fear, pressure, feeling one down, threats....

You can’t force feed learning.

Forced learning always fails.

You can’t learn for your child.

When a child seems to resist learning, something is wrong. The answer is to understand what is wrong, not to try to push through the “resistance.” (We’ll come back to this in the chapter called “Debug.”)

Perhaps our most important task as parents is to tap this deep source of energy to learn, encourage it, and not allow anything or anyone to block it.