Hating school and loving money

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Coercive schooling distorts human ability to enjoy life. Coercive learning is based in extrinsic motivation. Teachers often claim that the entire life is based on external stimuli. They may say that people covet smartphones, a status car, or that attractive partner everyone is envious of.

Part of that reasoning is correct. A great deal of society covets those luxury items, and love to broadcast their status. However, few people realize that free learning based on the innate learn drive generates a very different hierarchy of needs and values. When the main driver of learning is the pleasure of learning, there are no areas of knowledge that may seem wasteful. No knowledge is boring as a result of the fact that it is unlikely to deliver that dream car. Human brain loves to know and understand more, and this provides a fantastic fuel for developing passions that change the world. The greatest geniuses of the past where not driven by a wish to have a luxury car. They were driven by the beauty of the creative process and the need to solve major problems facing mankind.

At school a student is pushed on a simple beaten track: earn good grades, get to a good university, get a good job, and then get your great car and that great partner you can boast of. This is a sad path that is largely based on hard work, dry goals, and significant risks to health and mental health in particular.

Contrast this with your own path based on the pleasure of exploring the world.

Say you want to find a cure for cancer because of losing a loved relative at the very young age. For years you can build knowledge with pleasure because at each step you feel you get closer to your goal. You study, you research, you talk to people, and possibly get to some good university where your great idol works. When you wake up in the morning, you are not thinking of cars or smartphones, but about that new research that you keep studying word for word to understand all its implication.

When you learn, you learn to be better and smarter in abstraction from mundane goals such as cars or attractive partners? You may still covet that new smartphone, but you know that it will come if you are good enough. Still, you would work over that cancer cure with or without the smartphone. The only thing that could drive you away from the goal is a true need from the bottom of Maslov's hierarchy. Even a genius needs to eat.

Coercion at school drives people away from lofty ambitions towards mundane pursuits