In my years as a private tutor, I witnessed a painful, recurrent conversation among my students and their parents. That conversation often started like this: “As your parents, we are worried and frustrated by your behavior. All you care about is having a good time, and you don’t seem able to put immediate gratification aside and do the work required to be successful in school.” The second, more detailed part of this conversation depended largely on gender: for girls, the parents would likely mention excessive socializing (phone, text, and social media) while for boys they would usually bemoan the movies, video games, and internet surfing that distracted them from schoolwork. In most cases, the children were all-too-familiar with this accusation — for many years already, they had been exposed to this same cocktail of concern and disapproval from their teachers (who prescribed more effort), guidance counselors (who prescribed more tutors), and in many cases, from psychiatrists (who prescribed more medication).

Within the family, the school, and the mental health community, there’s a powerful and unstated assumption driving this conversation — namely, that there’s something wrong with kids who are not sufficiently motivated academically. The guiding premise here is that this problem originates within the individual student, from some combination of:

• Neurochemical imbalances that makes focusing and learning difficult
• Character flaws such as laziness or stupidity
• Fear of failure or of the discomfort of sustained effort

Whatever the particular cause in any particular case, the assumption here is that the problem (and therefore the remedy) lies WITHIN the student — more discipline, more effort, more tutoring, or more medication.

Several years ago, a teacher of mine (the cosmologist Brian Swimme) opened my eyes to an alternate perspective. In his opinion, the reason many students are refusing to work is not that school is too hard, but that it’s not hard ENOUGH! Swimme’s view is that many children today understand — though often wordlessly — that the challenges we are setting before them are meaningless and undeserving of their energy, and they are registering their disappointment by acting out (with drugs and disobedience) and acting in (with apathy and depression).

Swimme’s perspective helped me understand why some children simply cannot motivate themselves to write a three-page paper on the theme of the American dream in The Great Gatsby. I imagine that if they could find the words, they might say something like this: “This same EXACT paper has been written by every high school student in America for the last forty years. So, there are already 100 million copies of this paper already in existence. What possible benefit could there be to my writing another one, especially since it will be read by only one person, who has read several hundred of the same damn paper every year for DECADES?!”

I should say that this is not true for all young people. For some students, there IS something that feels engaging and important about understanding how Fitzgerald’s novel portrays abstract ideals and literary themes. While I don’t want to imply that this exercise is meaningless for all students, it feels equally naïve to assume that it would be relevant for all students, and then to blame and stigmatize those children who disagree.

After two decades of working with young people, I’ve become convinced that there are certain children whose motivation can only be activated by profound challenges. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that memorizing the dates of Civil War battles fails to meet this test — especially since this information is now available right in every student’s pocket. As an alternative approach, we could task a group of students with building a robot that can rescue a person trapped in a burning building. Or, as an even better example, we could say, “Hey kids, clearly the adults of this world have not been able to solve the problem of capping carbon emissions. And if we don’t do something about this soon, billions of people and animals will suffer greatly. So, help us solve this problem. Tell us what resources you need to figure this out, and then present us with your best answer.”

John Taylor Gatto, in his acceptance speech for New York City Teacher of the Year Award, touched on this same theme, arguing that the educational systems of past centuries used this approach extensively. “Everywhere in this system, and at every age,” he explains, “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?”

In addition to challenging students with a problem worthy of their energies, there is a powerful subtextual message in this approach, which is that we believe in them, and that we respect them enough to entrust them with solving a problem that actually matters. Conversely, we can think about what message we communicate to young people today by forcing them to spend years of their life on problems that have already been solved millions of times, and that most adults find so useless that they themselves cannot solve them.

This perspective also sheds light on the usually unquestioned assumption that a student’s lack of motivation is the result of a strictly personal failing. In contrast to the dominant narrative, this view suggests that the problem may not lie with the students, but rather, with the work we are demanding of them. To some of these apathetic students, I imagine that doing homework might feel a lot like digging and then filling holes for several hours a day. As teachers, we might argue that while schoolwork might feel boring, it’s nevertheless important because — at the end of the day — it leads to lasting knowledge. At the same time, however, it feels important to point out that more than 95% of what students learn for any particular high school test is COMPLETELY forgotten within just a few weeks. In this sense, then, the holes we make young people dig ARE continuously being filled in, leaving students with little to show for their effort, stress, and sleepless nights.

Over the years, I’ve had the chance to explore what difference it makes to offer students a challenge worthy of their creativity, and I have found the results to be quite remarkable. As one example, I was once hired to help forty Hawaiian children in rehab for crystal meth addiction paint two 30-ft murals. These children were the most apathetic and disempowered group I’d ever encountered. However, once I told them that their murals would be the center pieces of a giant show at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center just two weeks later, their attitude began to change. After they realized that their names would be printed on the wall next to the piece for the whole world to see, they became yet more focused. And, once they agreed among themselves that their goal was to give pictorial form to the destruction of Hawaiian culture  — a subject that they all felt was deeply important and personally relevant — they became intensely dedicated to their project. It was awe-inspiring for me to see how, after these young people came to see these murals as their chance to share a dire and essential warning with a community that was ready to honor their voices and truly listen, they found access to unbounded energy and focus.

What this example suggests to me is that we should be very careful about blaming students for their lack of motivation. For many students, the fault may lie in the stars we teach them to reach for, rather than in themselves.

In this next post, we’ll explore how our current historical moment offers young people a challenge truly worthy of their creativity.