How do you motivate them to learn?
She sometimes just doesn't have the motivation. "I don't want to do it" is the response I get or, "It is too much writing", she whines.
What if your husband insisted you read and write about economic allocative mechanisms and Educational Applications of Simmelian Play-Form Heuristics? Would your -- I presume! -- lack of enthusiasm towards his suggestion be a lack of motivation or a lack of interest?
Do you ever have a problem with motivating your child to get interested in "learning" about something? I purchase curriculum from a charter-like school. I'm really interested in unschooling but I'm afraid my kids would want to play all day. I know children learn through "play" but I don't think playing with their action-figure toys all day would benefit their extended learning. What do you do about this?
Question: How would your husband get you interested in rebuilding carburetors?
Answer: He probably couldn't! Motivation comes from inside. It comes from someone wanting to pull the information in because they need it or want it, not from someone else persuading them that something is interesting or important enough to learn.
How did your kids learn English? What kind of words did they use as 2 yos? Did you worry that cup and red and owwie and juice weren't preparing them to be corporate executives?
The way they learned is they lived one day at a time, reaching out for what they needed for the moment. And day by day, living for each day, they got to be where they are today.
Preparing someone for an unknown future is hard boring work. It takes years. But if a child pursues what interests him, he's already preparing for his future. Even if he's playing with action figures.
Play is how children are designed to explore the world and learn. Play is their natural state. Or it is until adults come along and mess it up trying to impose unnatural learning ways on them. And because those ways are unnatural, they are hard for kids. We assume because kids find the imposed type of learning difficult that what they're learning is difficult. But it isn't the "what" that's difficult. It's the "how" that's difficult. The difference between being made to learn something someone else wants you to and playing is the difference between climbing up the side of a really steep mountain that someone else decided you need to climb, and rambling all over the mountainside exploring and playing and having fun. One is work and if you don't like where you ended up, you'll probably never climb another mountain. The second is fun and where you end up isn't nearly as important as what you discovered along the way.
