Intrinsic versus Extrensic Motivation

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


http://www.chrismercogliano.com/be-my-guest-unschooling-reflects-current-cognitive-research/


I read the above article today regarding intrinsic versus extrinsic learning and how studies have revealed the positive effects of intrinsic learning, which if you're doing it the right way, should be the main learning style of unschooling.  I found this article very interesting and it helped me feel confident that unschooling is the best direction for me and deep down, I feel like it would be the best direction for everyone.  It touched on how if extrinsic motivations are incorporated into learning when the person is already intrinsically motivated, it can actually have an adverse effect on motivation to learn.  So grades and awards for learning could actually interfere in the learning process instead of encouraging a child. 


This idea made me think back to when I was in school and some of my friends would get paid for their grades and I told my parents about it.  They told me that I should be motivated to learn just to learn and being paid for grades was not necessary.  I accepted it and was not overly concerned that they did not agree to pay me for my grades.  Money has never been a huge motivator for me to succeed in my life.  However, experiences like that are probably why.  I had older parents who had already raised several children before me and they seemed to learn from their mistakes.  I also was not given an allowance and was told that helping is just part of being a member of the family.  I guess this wisdom motivated me to use this same thinking style with my own children.  So we do not use grades and if they do well at something, a trophy is not necessary, but just the satisfaction that they succeeded is enough.


This also made me think about the different things that inspire my 7 year old son.  We went to the children's museum when he was 5 and he sat through a demonstration about how to prepare a mummy.  That was followed by a year of mummy research and building mummies and learning about mummies, making mummy costumes, finding videos about mummies and thinking about mummies nonstop.  We would go to the library and leave with 4 books about mummies and we would read all of the books.  There were no grades during this time, no tests and no expectations.  He just really found mummies to be the most interesting thing that had ever come into his life.  Then he discovered great apes and loved watching the orangutans at our local zoo.  He then learned everything he could learn about great apes.  We got books about great apes, he has several orangutan, gorilla and chimpanzee toys.  He would look through my husband's physical anthropology book and when I asked him if he could take a college course, what would it be?  He said that he would like to take a physical anthropology course studying non-human primates and maybe learn about studies on orangutans.  He also said that he wanted to learn Indonesian because this was the main language in Borneo and Sumatra where the Orangutans live in the wild and we learned of an orangutan sanctuary where they study orangutans.  So my husband has been working with him on learning Indonesian.  He also learned that palm oil is destroying the orangutan habitat because rain forest are being destroyed for palm oil plantations.  That made me aware of how many things have palm oil as a main ingredient.  I was never aware of any of these things until my 7 year old became interested in them and he is not graded on any of this.  He just wants to learn.  He is also fascinated by the anatomy of the human body and likes to make replicas of the human body out of various objects laying around the house.  He is a very busy child and is always learning.  If someone came up to him and said that if he did a quiz about orangutans and got an A, they would give him a trophy, I doubt this would motivate him because he already has the intrinsic motivation to keep the momentum going.  He is like a sponge when something catches his interest and there is no need for a reward at the end of the day.  Learning is reward enough. 


If he was in a typical first or second grade classroom, would he have any of the knowledge he has today?  I do not see any way he would.  He has had the freedom to learn what he wants when he wants and he would be so limited in a classroom setting.  With this mindset, it is amazing where he may be ten years from now or what type of career he may choose with this style of learning being introduced so early in his life.  It is also interesting to think about how different society would be if people were focused more on the intrinsic value rather than the extrinsic value of existence.  Would people stay at full time jobs they hated?  Would there be as much misery and dissatisfaction among people of all ages?  Money is often the focus of motivation when in reality, passion and interest would be a much more efficient motivator when dealing with life in general and career choices.  Intrinsic motivation is key with having a happy and productive life and I am so glad unschooling is an option to make this mindset possible to blossom in a human being.