In my years as a private tutor, I witnessed the same painful conversation again and again. Parents would sit their kid in the living room and say: “We’re worried about you. You’re just chasing momentary gratification and ignoring the hard work school requires.” The details usually split by gender—girls “too social,” boys “too into games and videos.” Teachers urged more effort, counselors more tutoring, psychiatrists more medication. 

Beneath this widely repeated argument sits an invisible assumption: something is wrong with students who aren’t academically motivated. We blame neurochemistry, character flaws, or fear of hard work. We prescribe more discipline, more drills, more meds.

Several years ago, the cosmologist Brian Swimme opened my eyes to an alternate perspective. Maybe the reason many students are refusing to work is not that school’s too hard, but that it’s not hard enough! Maybe young people today understand that the challenges school sets before them don’t matter, and they register their objection through distraction, disobedience, apathy, even depression.

Take the classic high school task: a three-page paper on the American Dream in The Great Gatsby. For most students, this is the epitome of a pointless endeavor – literally hundreds of thousands of nearly identical versions of this essay are written every year, read by one exhausted teacher, and then summarily thrown in the trash. 

After two decades with young people, I’ve become convinced that many students will only light up for real challenges. Memorizing Civil War battle dates won’t do it—especially now that those facts can be found on every phone. But ask a team of students to imagine how they will coexist with millions of robots? Now they’re awake. Better yet, we could say: “Obviously, adults have failed to cap carbon emissions. If we don’t act, billions will suffer. Help us solve this problem. Tell us the resources you need. Bring us your best plan.”

In his acceptance speech for New York City Teacher of the Year Award, John Taylor Gatto touched on this same theme. In the educational systems of past centuries, he explained, “you will find arrangements that place a child in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump…Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in her ability to do anything?”

When we hand students a significant challenge, we also hand them a deeper message: we trust you. We believe you can do work that truly matters. Conversely, think of the message we communicate to young people by forcing them to spend years of their life on problems that have already been solved millions of times – and that are so useless that adults have long forgotten how to solve them.

This reframing exposes the weak link in the usual narrative. Maybe the “motivation problem” isn’t in our kids. Maybe it’s in the work we are demanding of them. To many students, homework rightly feels like digging holes and refilling them every day. We insist that it builds lasting knowledge, but most of what’s crammed for tests is completely forgotten within weeks. The hole fills. The ground looks the same. What remains is just stress, lost sleep, and a diminished enthusiasm for learning.

Over my decades as an educator, I’ve seen what happens when students are presented a challenge worthy of their creativity. Years ago, I was hired to help forty Hawaiian children in rehab for crystal meth addiction paint two thirty-foot murals. They were the most shut-down group I’d ever met. However, when they learned that their murals would be the center piece of a show at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center just two weeks later, their attitude began to change. And, once they agreed among themselves that their goal was to give visual form to the destruction of Hawaiian culture  — a subject that they all felt was profoundly important and personally relevant — they became intensely dedicated to their project. After these young people came to see these murals as their chance to share a dire warning with a community that was ready to honor their voices and truly listen, they found a reservoir of focus and fire that stunned me. 

The crucial lesson here is that we should be careful about blaming students for their lack of motivation. For many young people, the fault may lie in the stars we teach them to reach for, rather than in themselves. When we offer them a goal that matters — a problem with real consequence, a task that joins their gifts to the world’s needs — they can often tap into limitless sources of energy.

In this next post, we’ll explore how our current historical moment offers young people exactly this kind of challenge.