Piaget: On Learning
... to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn to walk, talk recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science because these bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved (p. 222). If this evolutionary view proposed by Pinker is correct, we would expect that as children move through their compulsory schooling and presumably from a curriculum centered on concrete operational / biologically primary abilities to one centered on formal operational / biologically secondary abilities that student motivation would shift from intrinsic to extrinsic. This is exactly the pattern that we find. Steinberg (1996) reports “we know that early on - in preschool, for example - children are highly intrinsically motivated and naturally curious, and they need little in the way of extrinsic rewards to motivate them to participate energetically in classroom activities (p. 73). Steinberg goes on to note that: Regardless of what parents and teachers wish, intrinsic motivation plays a relatively small role in motivating student performance in adolescence and beyond. In our survey, for example, the most common reason students gave for trying hard in school was not genuine interest in the material, but getting good grades in order to get into the coll...