In his book “Drive”, Daniel Pink describes a scientific revolution in the understanding of what motivates people.  He argues that, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the dominant view of human nature has been that people are solely motivated by external rewards and punishments.  We need carrots and sticks to be compelled to do anything, because it isn’t in our nature to accomplish things for the sheer pleasure of doing them. We can’t be trusted to work unless we are bribed or compelled to do so.  

That made sense in an age when no one would do tedious factory work unless they were paid — certainly, no one would volunteer to do it for free.  Fortunately, human beings also have a different and much more self-directed form of motivation. Over the past few decades, behavioral scientists have discovered ample evidence that humans have an intrinsic drive to work and learn out of enthusiasm for the task at hand, without external rewards or punishments.  We are hardwired to strive for excellence for its own sake. New businesses, particularly in the high tech world, are actively cultivating that drive. They have discovered that when people are given autonomy to decide what they want to work on and how they want to do their jobs, they become much more productive and creative.

Studies have also shown that providing external rewards and punishments for people who enjoy their work is, with few exceptions, counterproductive.  Such efforts generally backfire and can actually sabotage people’s intrinsic desire to work, to learn, to excel at something new. People become less enthusiastic, less productive, and less happy as a result.

Pink describes how the gap between what science knows about human motivation and what most businesses continue to assume about their workers — that they need carrots and sticks — actively squelches people’s creativity and their engagement.  Given the realities of the rapidly changing nature of work, it is ludicrous for a business to ignore and even inadvertently suppress people’s intrinsic drive to learn, to create, to master new skills. To do so is to to squander its most powerful resource.  

But if it is bad for business, this mistake is catastrophic for schools.

I think it’s fair to say that a common view of students is that they don’t learn because they want to, but because they are made to.  If you doubt this idea, imagine a school in which there were no grades. Would students still be motivated to do the work of learning?  Would they still do homework? Would they study for tests? The working assumption is that students must be rewarded and punished through the use of grades, and if that doesn’t work, through other external punishments like detentions, suspensions, or, in extreme cases, expulsions.

Unfortunately, given the basic premise of the Curriculum Transfer Model, this attitude about students’ motivation makes sense.  The model’s central task — the importing of curricular standards into students’ minds — is directed from the outside in. It is an external goal being driven by external incentives.  Furthermore, since the breadth and rigor of the curriculum standards have been created without asking the question of whether they are relevant to students’ lives, a great deal of the curriculum that students are being compelled to master is not particularly meaningful for them.  

People have long described the current structure of school as “the factory model”, and it’s easy to see why.  Students marching from English to math to history class as the bells ring every 43 minutes looks a lot like the classic image of an assembly line used to make cars.  But there is a deeper connection as well; like factory work, a student’s task must be driven through external rewards and punishments.

Yet what science is telling us is that every person is born with a nearly unquenchable desire to learn and to excel.  This is a fundamental part of human nature. Watch any two year old, and you can have no doubt about her intrinsic drive to learn about the world.  By the time that same child is in third grade, however, it is hard to find the same enthusiasm about learning in an academic setting. The relentless external motivators that drive student behavior in school actively train them to game the system.  Carrots and sticks stifle the intrinsic drive to learn.

It is time to reject the untrusting and negative working assumptions about our students.  We have to replace the classroom structures that have been shaped by the Curriculum Transfer Model with an approach that trusts in students’ intrinsic desire to learn and allows it to flourish.  We must focus on our students as people, and, in particular, what character attributes they acquire in school.