CHAPTER 5

PLEASURE IN LEARNING

Newborn children are soon hungry and curious. They want to eat and they want to learn about their surroundings. They suckle at the breast and they swivel their heads toward sounds. When they can see, they stare at anything new. Eating and learning both carry out innate needs or desires that drive humans throughout their lives. A rule of nature requires actions fulfilling innate desires be pleasurable. Without enjoyment, necessary actions would cease, and the species would die out.

This pleasure is obvious and well understood for eating. The enjoyment of learning is often overlooked. Since the need for learning is innate, it is also enjoyable. The reason, Patrick Koch, the second grader in Chapter 2, wanted to read his encyclopedia was because it was fun.

Despite the inherent satisfaction of actions that satisfy basic needs, pleasure can be lost. The environment may make eating disagreeable in a specific location. Researchers studying behavior of white rats sometimes combine tasty food with an electrical shock at a certain place in the cage. If the rat nibbles at food in that place, it will be shocked and it doesn't take the rat long to avoid eating there. If an animal refuses to eat good food at a specific spot, that area must be responsible.

Students should enjoy their classes because learning, which fulfills a basic desire, is the object. If children reject education, the type of learning or the place may be the cause, but something is wrong. Millions of children are rejecting education today. Many drop out of school. Others remain and attend classes but are bored.

When animals or humans don't find healthy food in appropriate conditions, they look elsewhere for nourishment to satisfy their basic need. When students don't find appropriate learning in school, they also look elsewhere. They satisfy the fundamental need by finding other sources like TV, their peers and movies where learning is pleasurable as it should be. If this "education" replaces what they should receive in school, they and the nation suffer. Valuable and available stores of accumulated knowledge are unused and replaced by junk learning, just as animals or humans might be forced to eat junk food when the good food is in a location where eating is painful.

Although reasons abound why education may be unpleasant, some are especially critical:

• 1. Schools must bind students in a rigid mold where they have to receive instruction at the same pace as twenty-five to thirty others, all with different capabilities and interests.
• 2. Monotonous and uninteresting classes repel students and make it unpleasant to learn. Like everyone else, you, the reader, can remember when you were forced at times during your schooling, to endure tedious classes. Unfortunately, teachers without special talents, despite their sincere efforts, may provide classes that overwhelm the inherent enjoyment of learning.
• 3. Students with poorer grades, who account for many serious rejections of education, confront a continuous series of frustrations. They quickly get behind in the early grades and can never hope to catch up. Being behind, they lack a real opportunity to learn and miss the chance to enjoy formal education. School becomes a grating, despised activity.
• 4. Brighter students have different barriers interfering with their learning, but often they also find education unpleasant. The system bores them and fails to challenge them. Although learning new material brings them enjoyment, their delight diminishes when the pace is tiresome. Again, teachers are guiltless. If they go fast enough to make education completely satisfying for brighter children, they interfere with the learning of others.
• 5. Teaching to the exact ability of diverse students is utterly impossible without individual tutors. Enjoyable learning requires that instruction meet the intellectual capacity of each student just as food must meet individual needs in each animal.

Education of students with unequal levels of ability in the same class, with some teachers who lack stimulating approaches, has been going on for centuries. Pupils have been able to learn despite these shortcomings. Many do so under these same handicaps today, but this learning does not prove the efficacy of the educational system. It only emphasizes the strength of the innate drive that enables people to acquire knowledge in spite of obstacles. Nonetheless, millions of American students fail to learn in schools. Moreover, education bores countless others whose education falls short of their capabilities. Consequently, youngsters revolt against the educational process. Their antics create havoc within schools and obstruct learning for themselves and for others. The letter from the Philadelphia teacher quoted in Chapter 4 illustrated this devastation. Unfortunately, the usual reaction is to blame students. This scapegoating of pupils is equivalent to blaming animals that refuse to eat in a place where they have discovered they will receive an electric shock.

When pupils enjoy education, their learning will improve, and much of their current revolt against the system will dissipate. Fewer discipline problems in schools will be an immediate result. Authorities will then be able to devote more of their time and resources to improving education instead of merely holding it together.

A change in the attitude of students occurs in the Florida at-risk programs: education intrigues students who had hated school and had intended to drop out. An effective revolution in education must allow the innate pleasure to motivate students and increase their learning. Deriving pleasure from education is a valid goal, and should be commonplace since learning fills a basic need, exactly as eating fills a basic need. Schools must merely eliminate the obstacles that prevent this natural enjoyment.

How schools can tap into the basic pleasure of learning will be treated below. I will explain how education can make learning interesting, avoid condemning students to the lockstep enslavement of present schooling, prevent slower students from falling behind, and enable brighter students to avoid boredom while new opportunities challenge them unceasingly. I will also show how learning can be tailored to the individual level of each student. Schooling will then be enhanced because it is partaking of the pleasure that accompanies the fulfillment of innate desires.

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copyright 1996Fred Bennett