In one classroom, I raised a simple question: Why do you learn? The answer was immediate: “So I can pass.” “So I can get a high percentage.” “So I can enter a major.”
All the answers are correct… yet they reveal something troubling. No one said: because I want to understand myself. No one said: because knowledge changes me before it changes my GPA.
There is a quiet difference between learning in order to arrive… and learning in order to grow. And we—without realizing it—have trained our children in the first, and left the second to chance.
The problem is not a lazy generation, nor students without ambition. The problem is deeper than that: education in their awareness has become a means of passage, not a space of formation. The most important question has become: What will I get? not: What will I become?
Educational psychology explains this shift precisely. Self-Determination Theory, as presented by Ryan and Deci (2000), indicates that a person needs three basic psychological needs in order to move with genuine intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When a student feels that he has a voice, that his effort is valued, and that he is part of an environment that respects him, learning becomes a conscious choice… not an imposed burden.
More recent meta-analytic reviews such as Howard et al. (2021) confirm that intrinsic motivation is associated with higher levels of persistence, quality performance, and psychological well-being, whereas motivation based on external pressure is associated with greater anxiety and a gradual extinguishing of passion. The difference is not in the “strength of motivation,” but in its source.
We—sometimes with good intentions—link learning to reward more than we link it to meaning. We praise the result more than we celebrate the attempt. We raise the high-achieving student onto the platform, yet we rarely elevate the value of the question that changed his way of thinking.
Even the well-known meta-analysis by Deci, Koestner, and Ryan (1999), which analyzed the results of 128 studies, found that excessive tangible rewards may weaken intrinsic motivation when the learner feels that his effort is directed toward pleasing the external world rather than satisfying his own curiosity.
Thus, the student learns an unwritten lesson: that the value of knowledge lies not in its impact on him… but in its impact on his image before others. A student successful on paper… yet hesitant in life. He memorizes what is required… yet does not know why he wants it. He fears mistakes because they threaten his evaluation, not because they prevent his understanding.
Perhaps we do not need new curricula as much as we need new questions. A question that restores the student’s voice. A question that allows him to see learning as a personal journey, not a collective race.
So ask yourself: does your child succeed… or does he live meaning?
And does your classroom produce grades… or awaken a human being?
And perhaps the question now approaching quietly is: where does the teacher’s role begin in restoring this meaning to its rightful place?
