I know I’m done with rewards. I have come to find the whole concept demeaning and rude and so 20th Century. Behavior modification, extrinsic motivation, gold stars, contests, “races to the top”, it all seems to no longer be useful in the evolution of our species. I think we are finally ready to let motivation be intrinsic and allow everyone to be who they really are and not what the rest of us want them to be instead.

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So what the heck does it mean to be an “internally motivated learner”? Is such an animal the exception or the rule? And can internal motivation drive even formal academic learning? In a culture where conventional wisdom seems to think that most of formal education needs to be mandated and externally motivated to be successfully undertaken, I think these are very important questions.

Certainly infants and toddlers learn most or all of what they learn for internal reasons. Infants don’t need to be motivated or instructed in how to walk, they are driven to do so and through practice, trial, and error they figure out how to do so. Toddlers learn to speak with a minimum of instruction, by listening to people speaking around them and learning to vocalize words and put them together into phrases and sentences. They learn a myriad of other skills involving coordination of their bodies with their brains on their own as well. (more…)