finding a drive

Motivation is not absent in anyone. There's what you call a drive. Drive is the force behind the human invention of the airplane, the translation of the Rosetta Stone. The intense need to go out star-gazing, even on a night that's ten degrees out or colder.

Schools function on the assumed basis that you have no drive for learning. If you let all the kids loose—as a teacher said, when I debated education theory with her this morning—they won't learn. Setting them free won't help, and if an ordinary day for you consists of walks by the river or in the arboretum, you won't learn enough. The assumption is that learning is Serious Business. It's definable; it can be separated into school-periods of 55 minutes each. Without a nudge from a teacher trained in classroom management, no one will bother beginning to learn, because it's too difficult or they find it dull.

There isn't a good reason why curriculum-makers should fall into this belief. Many students in middle school and high school are terrifically uninterested in the curricula set in front of them. Elementary schools know that children have short attention spans, and jazz their materials up for interest, if only a bit. But there's a root to the lack of drive displayed. It's not because of bad study habits or a negative attitude towards school.

It's true that they're unmotivated. In my first year of high school, nearly daily someone turns over to me and says, "Why do they make us do this shit?" Or "This is the worst book I've ever read"—every next assigned book being worse than the last. Someone I know has a teacher who requires that the staples, the staples attaching the pages of your essay together, be tilted at a precise 45 degrees. Otherwise, five points off your paper. Patently ridiculous, yeah; most teachers would even agree with me on that one. But it's the buildup of those inane requirements that inspires us to frustration.

They highlight the fact that minors don't choose to be in school.

Every adult life contains elements of choice. An adult with maturity and intelligence chooses the courses they take in college, if they attend; chooses someone to be a mentor for them; chooses where to apply for an internship. Although some kids (a minority) are allowed to select between one school or another, the environment remains the same.

A number of people—most, I would guess—could prosper in their learning in a manner removed from school. Such people, if they are not given the choice to become autodidacts or unschoolers, are legally bound to remain in an institution which does not suitably cater to their needs. An adult, trying to learn something they wanted to know, would be able to select among a variety of methods. These methods might include school-style courses, but would not be limited to them.

When a school isn't working to engage someone entirely in learning, that school is failing in its professed purpose. To want to learn is to be eaten up by exitement, able to feel genuine interest and passion about the material.

And if you've got no choice, even over where you're learning, why should anyone expect you to suddenly be filled with passion over the material spoon-fed to you?