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My View of the Elephant

The Fourth Tributary — Motivation

You’ve already heard my views on the central importance of the human motivation to learn. It is deeply wired into your child’s brain. We are dedicated and passionate learners by nature. So we have to include a child’s earnest motivation to learn as a part of the Intelligence River. But in spite of its overwhelming importance, we can still pass lightly over motivation for now. As we come to the sections where we talk about how to develop your child’s Intelligence River, I’ll talk about the sort of calm, easy, relaxed settings that I believe give human children their best framework for learning. Unfortunately, we’ll also need to talk quite a bit about motivation in the Debug chapter, since it is the most frequent interference to that part of their learning that children do in the school setting.

How do we imagine motivation in our map of the Intelligence River? The answer lies in the root meaning of the word: A casual glance shows us that it has the same origin as “motor” and refers to something that gives force and movement. It is not so much a tributary as the force that gives the entire Intelligence River its flowing power. So lets picture motivation as the mountains and hills from which the river flows — the uplifting that allows the streams to flow towards their goals.