Motivation in Education Motivation in Education
Education must transfer from generation to generation the core of our culture’s
accumulated body of knowledge. In our day, many think that to believe in an accepted body
of knowledge that prioritizes what is important to learn and what is not smacks of elitism
and exclusivity. In part, this charge cannot be denied because discernment often demands
that we play the role of intellectual hatchet-men; however, if you will reject the notion
of a “canon” of knowledge, you are faced with the task of creating a rational
for your own curriculum that can give a convincing answer to that most awkward but
ubiquitous question, “Why do we have to learn this?”
Having cut themselves free of the constraints that guide classical education, our large
educational institutions have resorted to an ever increasingly frantic attempt to
construct a convincing rational for their methodology out of the vacuum of their own
errant psyches. Yet, whether they resort to ethnicity, technology, gender or the deviancy
of pop culture, their attempts to give meaning to their teaching end up being mere
exercises in personal assertiveness.
Even though our secular school system abandoned any true foundation for absolutes by
rejecting God’s authority over all of life, academia has been able to keep a coherent
system together by merely coasting on the inertia built up by our culture’s rich
intellectual tradition. This has been especially true in Mathematics where a healthy
regard for disciplined rigorous thinking and applied mental struggle were thought to
guarantee mental fruit, but now, even this field seems vulnerable to the prevailing
epistemological meltdown. The “new new math” curricula currently being promoted
by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics seems bent on destroying mathematical
rigor in hopes of instilling students with such dubiously mathematical abilities as
“group learning skills”, “guess and check techniques” and
“awareness of diverse cultural approaches to mathematics”. By attempting to make
math more “interesting” and “accessible”, they have removed precisely
what makes Mathematics a joy to learn. No longer will students be able to savor the hard
won pleasure of successfully working complex mathematical procedures. Even in the field of
Mathematics where you think it would be nearly impossible for the mind to be led astray,
our schools are abandoning rigor and sense for mere gimmicks and social agendas . What is
the philosophical lesson from all this? The closer and closer man comes to pure
epistemological autonomy (that is, the ability to accept only those ideas he finds within
himself) the closer he comes to resigning himself to complete nonsense.
For students to be motivated in their studies, they need to know that what they are
studying is indeed of real significance. They need to know that they are not being feed
some new-sprung agenda or half-baked innovation that will simply go the way of the faddish
educational chaff that, once having gleaned its profits, goes to the winds never to be
seen or thought of again. Students need to know that they are being feed the best that our
civilization has to offer- that they are studying something that is much, much larger than
themselves. As I guide students through the study of the proofs in Euclid’s Elements,
it is always a pleasure to point out to them the fact that their geometry book is the same
that was used by Thomas Jefferson, James Garfield, Lewis Carroll and a host of other
intellectual witnesses going back before 200 BC. Even though Euclid makes absolutely no
attempt to show you how his system is “practical”, I do not find my students
asking, “what will I ever us this for?” Because the Element’s is truly a
classic work, the students come to see why mathematicians have admire Euclid’s
beautifully constructed proofs through the ages.
When we climb out of the broad stream that comprises the wisdom of the ages, it is very
easy to lose our educational bearings, being blown to and fro be the winds of opinion.
Furthermore, without a good rational for our curriculum, we will be unable to resist the
student’s desire to find the path of least exertion between now and breaktime. To be
motivated to work, we need to instill in our children first godly character and then the
conviction that their studies are indeed significant. Despite the mantras that are
continually chanted around us, the motivation for pursuing an education does not come from
looking at charts of the average salary levels of various degree recipients, or from
following the educational atomism that reduces all educational accomplishment to a single
GPA, or by explaining all labors as just steps in the great “ordu salutis”
culminating in acceptance by that Ivy-league dream college. By putting before students
these poor reasons for getting an education we are drumming into them the idea that
education is a means and not an end. Until they understand that education is an end in
itself, that indeed, the creation in which we dwell and the historical saga in which we
take part are truly worthy of our interest and concentrated study, we will only see them
labor with a slave’s reluctance.
