Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 27 seconds

I think distinguishing motivations as internal and external, while perhaps useful in some contexts, eventually leads back to a traditional model of education and human behavior. You write: “I am often confused about how community relates to motivation: is it an intrinsic or extrinsic motivator? I mean, people are external to ourselves, but our enjoyment of them is internal. Do we enjoy them because of some trigger they do or some need for approval we are seeking or some such external thing, or do we just enjoy them because they are? I would guess both?” I think your answer is in your questions. Motivation is both. Education is about the desire to connect, to make connections, which is the natural inclination of the entire universe—thank God—or else none of us would be here.

I’m writing a post about this now, this desire to connect things and to things, including people. Of course, I’m exploring it from the point of view of prepositions, those tiny grammatical couplers that build the connections within sentences and paragraphs that help us writers map connections among ideas and people mostly—as I am doing in this comment. Everything from quarks to galaxies desires to connect. People are mostly defined by their desires to connect, to couple, and yes, the sexual connotation is there and intentional, but it is not dominant. Connecting, coupling has infinite expressions. Our current educational processes are not adept at recognizing the desires (motivations) of our students or cultivating them in ways that are beneficial for both student and society.

The first step is to abandon the intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy. Desire always includes a coupling, a connection, even if the coupling is frustrated. When one oxygen atom seeks to couple with a hydrogen atom, there is desire (motivation) cut perhaps to its simplest form, and the desire is not intrinsic to either atom; rather, it is the dynamic coupling between the two atoms. All our students have desires to connect to their worlds. Children want to taste, look at, smell, stick their fingers into, and hear everything. It seems to me that we spend too much of early education damming/damning up their desires rather than channeling and capitalizing upon their desires. We are mostly just afraid of their desires.

Of course, desires can lead to both wonderful and disastrous connections, and we must help students channel their desires, but we don’t get rid of desires by repressing them; rather, as Freud taught us, we simply pervert them into something monstrous in the dark corners of our hearts.