How to Increase 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.

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.