What's so insightful about that?

I've been thinking more about the post I linked to here last night. Here's the link again. It was already long after I should have been sleeping, so I did not take the time to comment at length.

So, what's so insightful?

I don't know that I'd use the descriptors of school that Kevin used, particularly the defecation reference. I have a healthy respect for defecation, so I'm uncomfortable with using it with negative connotations. And I just don't think I'd go so far as to use the specific term he used to describe school. I prefer to think in terms of what I'm 'fer instead of what I'm agin'.

I don't find it particularly significant that he was able to get decent grades when he had never had formal instruction. I don't hold his occasional atrocious grammar against him. (It was interesting that one commenter pointed out that his grammar was great, except for when he talked about how his teachers admired his writing skill.)

What I found insightful was his perception of his fellow students, and this in two points. First, he found them paralyzed by thoughts of what they were unable to do. "Can't" defined them, he said. Second, he found that the love for learning had been sucked right out of most everyone. High school freshmen were no longer eager to gain new knowledge. This, perhaps, does not strike most readers as news. The real news was that this kid found that to be highly abnormal, and irritating.

This matter of intrinsic motivation in education is one that has been on my mind for the last several weeks as I've been reading Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards. I've been thinking of my own experiences in school, and my attraction to a liberal arts education. I attended Wisconsin Lutheran College which was shifting from a two-year to a four-year institution when I began there. Perhaps in part because it was definitely not a resume-building institution at the time, much emphasis was given to education as intrinsically valuable for the full formation of a human being, rather than being a mere stepping stone to career and money. This resonated with me strongly, and in many ways I felt that it was only in college where I began to own my education. I only wish this paradigm had dawned on me many years before.

Kohn in Punished By Rewards lays out a logical case for what causes the phenomenon that Kevin Snavley observed in his high school experiment. That will have to come in a later post. I'm on my third successive library check-out of the book, and I'm determined to finish it before I comment on the whole book.