Preparing what's inside

Intrinsic motivation is one of those ideas that people think is so hard to see or know.  Perhaps, but consider the life of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Both had childhoods that indicated what motivated them.  In 4th grade, Jobs' teacher had to bribe him to do well in school.  It wasn't that he couldn't do well.  It was that he wasn't motivated to do well.  Jobs could score well on standardized tests.  Administrators offered Job's parents to promote him to high school from middle school, but his parents declined.  So, Jobs remained somewhat of a prankster throughout his school career.  Eventually, he went to college only to drop out.  Gates, on the other hand was very competitive.  He thrived because making good grades was competitive.  But his interest was not in school subjects.  It was in something the school couldn't offer.  Gates ended up at Harvard, only to drop out.

What motivated Jobs?  Electronics.  His adopted father taught him electronics all through his late childhood and adolescent years.  That's what he lived for.  That's where he applied his creative genius.  He learned his discipline and  innovation at the hobby table at home from his adopted dad.  And, what was Gates' motivative source?  Why, programming BASIC of course - at a time when very few people were learning BASIC.  He would go to bed at 9:00.  Wake up at 3 AM.  Walk to the university lab that was empty at that hour.  Finish at 6 AM.  Walk back home.  Set his alarm for 7 so that his parents would think that he had a good night's sleep.  And then go to school where socially he didn't really fit into a larger group.

It didn't matter that school didn't offer what they wanted.  They had the incentive to do what intrinsically motivated them on their own.  (Incidentally, almost a century before these two creative giants, Edison and Bell had much the same experience with their existing school systems).  The rest of their stories illustrate that they didn't need college either.  I can only imagine what would happen in a world in which we paid attention to young people's patterns of discipline and creativity.  I believe we would find that four core subjects is the same as wearing a straight jacket.  Could we not help our youth to be creative and fascinated by something beyond punctuation, multiplication tables, two-tiered science experiments, and date-filled state histories?  I think our country's educational system should cater to what motivates people from the inside, not grade-leveled information surrounding 4 subjects packaged in text.  Our country could stand another Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.  They will surface, of course, but wouldn't it be nice to have 10 times as many of them if intrinsic motivation were to be considered in what our schools formally trained people in.