I was once challenged to a spelling competition by a six-year-old inner-city girl. Though she had the option of playing outside, she thought writing words on a marker board was more fun. She named a word and the race was on to write it correctly first. Just to make it fair she made me look the other way while I wrote. Her favorite word was "butterfly" and she spelled it with two T's and everything.
This little girl had not yet had the love of learning stolen from her.
Dr Edward Deming often explained to befuddled managers that the idea of motivating employees is an illusion. But managers can demotivate. Some ways to demotivate are obvious like poor working conditions or communication. Other ways are less intuitive like tightly linking pay to performance or holding workers to quotas. The false assumption behind this type of thing is that people don't care about their work and so you must bring out the carrot and stick to motivate them.
But most people want to do a good job just like most kids want to learn everything about the world around them. They only need the proper tools and a little direction. The carrot and stick only serve to replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation. They can now be controlled but will only do the minimum for their reward. There is no joy or enthusiasm or drive to succeed left for them.
A teacher can't make a child learn no matter what they do but they can shape the trajectory, supply resources (preferably for the awesome stuff), and support the child's innate enthusiasm. Any more is less.
