From \"Made to Learn\" to \"Want to Learn\

1. One Word Apart, Two Different Lives

"Made to learn" and "want to learn" — a single word apart, and yet two utterly different lives stand on either side.

"Made to learn" is something done under a push: the drive is on the outside — fear of being scolded, fear of falling behind, fear of failing your parents' hopes. Withdraw the outside force, and the drive scatters. "Want to learn" — the drive is on the inside, because I want to know, I want to make it work, I feel this thing has to do with me. The first is being pushed along, spending a measure of yourself with every step; the second is wanting to go, gaining drive the farther you walk.

Almost every child who hates school has his problem in the same place: learning, for him, has long since turned wholly into "made to learn." It's a task someone shoved at him, not his own thing. So the deepest turn in education was never to make a child learn more, or faster, but to find a way to make "learning" his own thing again.

How, then, do you grow a child from "made to learn" back into "want to learn"? The answer hides in a question that comes earlier still: what is education actually for?

2. The Four Fundamental Aims of Education

In *Creative Schools*, Ken Robinson reduced the purpose of education to four fundamental directions. They are also the four aims our Island Academy means to hold to:

• Social — helping a child learn to understand others, build relationships, and become a member of a community. People grow up inside relationships; an isolated person learns poorly, and lives poorly too.
• Economic — giving a child the capacity to stand on his own economically in the future, to find something that can support him and that he's willing to throw himself into — not just to scrape together a diploma.
• Cultural — letting a child understand the culture he stands in and respect the cultures of others, knowing where he came from and how he relates to this world.
• Personal — the one most easily neglected by present-day education, and the most fundamental: helping each child come to know the talent and passion within him, and grow into himself.

Robinson put it bluntly: present-day education chases frantically after the narrowest sliver of the "economic" aim (the standard part bound for admissions and employment), while letting the other three run almost entirely to ruin — personal fulfillment above all. A child never allowed to find out "who I am, what I really want to do" will of course only ever be "made to learn" — because he was never given the chance to find that "I want."

3. Inner Drive Grows Out of These Four

Why does holding to these four aims grow "made to learn" back into "want to learn"?

Because inner drive isn't conjured out of thin air by shouting; it has to attach to something. Dewey said it long ago: real learning grows inside real experience and real relationships. When a child feels safe inside a relationship that accepts him (Social), when the thing he does connects to something he genuinely cares about (Personal), when he sees that this thing has to do with the real world and a real livelihood (Cultural and Economic) — only then does learning turn from "required of me" into "I want it."

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent a lifetime studying "flow," and his conclusion points to the same place: a person throws himself in wholeheartedly, and loves it, on one condition — the thing has meaning for him, and matches his ability. Where does meaning come from? Exactly from these four — above all when a child is, at last, doing something that "belongs to himself."

So these four aims aren't four hollow slogans. They are four plots of soil in which inner drive can grow again. With the soil in place, "I want to learn" sprouts on its own — and you no longer have to push.

4. So the First Thing the Island Academy Does Isn't "Teach"

This is why, when a child arrives at the Island Academy, the first thing we do is not rush to "teach him something."

First we rebuild relationships, so that among a group of people he feels safe and accepted again (Social); first we help him find again the thing that lights up his eyes, even if it has nothing to do with exams (Personal); we let him do real things in the real world, to understand people and cultures, and to try his hand at the first form of making a living (Cultural and Economic). Once these four are laid down, the "I want" that was pressed down for so long finally pushes its head up on its own.

Settle first, then kindle, then grow — we never do the "learning" for a child; we simply ready those four plots of soil, one by one, and then wait, with patience. Because we have always believed: no child is born not loving to learn. There are only children who were made to learn for too long, and forgot that they once wanted to. Give him back that "I want," and the rest, he'll walk on his own.