Extrinsic Education Was Always the Problem

Back in June, I ordered my transcript for a Masters program I completed online from 2021 - 2025. The St. John’s Great Books program is known for its rigor and unique reading list - not so much for its credentialing. The resulting de-emphasis on grading means SJC faculty only offer comments on papers and don’t share their marks with students at the end of each semester. The only way I could see how I did was to request my transcript.

When it arrived last week, I confess I was curious. Fifty-plus years in education - first as a student and now as a teacher - have conditioned me to accept the absurdity that a single letter grade represents a student’s entire learning experience in a class. In one seminar, we had no papers or other means of assessment - that grade might as well have been pulled from a hat.

Overall, I did well. Yet, none of those letters revealed how well I understood Plato, Kant, or the Bible. The Great Books program is seen more as a calling, a personal quest to actually read the classic texts with like-minded peers. Assigning grades in that context feels almost like an oxymoron, but as a degree-granting institution, it’s a requirement.

Once students reach a certain age, we issue letter grades for everything - papers, tests, projects, quizzes, presentations, and so on. The grading system is so deeply ingrained in schools we almost never question it.

AI has only supercharged the grading arms race. With competition for higher grades at an all-time high, the temptation to offload work, bypass learning, and produce solely for the grade seems higher than ever. The motivation to perform in school is almost entirely extrinsic.

The question we probably don’t want to know the answer to (or, the one deep down we already do) is:

How many students view learning as the primary goal of their time in class?

That question is really a question about motivation. The best book I’ve read about motivation was published almost four decades ago and isn’t actually about motivation.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is more relevant than ever to our AI-saturated world.

Flow is his name for the state in which a task absorbs a person so completely that it shuts out almost everything else - it results in pure enjoyment, even if the activity is difficult (like swimming the English Channel). While he identifies eight components of flow, three of them describe conditions a teacher can actually create. The activity has to demand real skill and a task with a realistic chance of completion. It must have a clear goal. And, crucially, feedback has to be immediate.

Every teacher knows instinctively that tasks - whether in the classroom, on the field, or on your own - need to be calibrated so that the difficulty level matches a student’s edge of capability. Design a task that requires skills students have not yet mastered, and the ensuing frustration prevents “flow.” If it’s too easy, boredom sets in. The golden ratio is that match between ability and difficulty that leaves us engrossed.

Establishing flow conditions in a classroom does not mean cheap entertainment or diluting rigor. In fact, the opposite is usually the case. Matt Brady, a chemistry teacher, opens the year by having his students make gunpowder. They have to convert percentages to grams before they can collect a single ingredient, and write it all up afterward. Teachers like Brady have always existed. As a student, I considered them eccentric. Now I know they were building the optimal conditions for flow all along.

In a section entitled “The Challenge of Lifelong Learning,” Csikszentmihalyi writes:

Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom. (emphasis added).

Extrinsically motivated education is a perfect phrase that captures modern schooling. The motivator is usually grades. Most classes students complete over the course of their academic careers are graduation requirements.

Csikszentmihalyi continues:

But a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free. His thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television. He will be at the mercy of “experts.” Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one’s experience is all about. From that will come the profound joy of the thinker …

A student who glides through school, even a successful one, but who has never been taught to question their own opinions or been challenged by someone with more knowledge, is utterly at the mercy of our current media environment. It accounts for so many of the problems with online behavior - toxic forums filled with misinformation, disinformation, hate, and ignorance as well as the superficiality of short-form video, influencer and TikTok culture. Teachers need to, unironically, model the “profound joy of the thinker.”

Human beings are naturally curious creatures - we want to learn new skills and new things all the time. Throughout the bulk of human history, the motivation was not external validation in the form of grades. It was something deeper, more primal, and fundamental, often life-saving.

My teaching log for my graduate program in the late 90’s included this provocative question:

Think back to a time when you had a high level of success in learning something that you feel was challenging to you. What was the nature of the learning situation that enabled you to master these difficult ideas or skills?

I wrote about my response to that question in a previous post, but I want to expand on the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

Motivation is essential when it comes to learning. The course I wrote about was one in which I became internally motivated. The instructor had set up conditions in which the learning - in that case, improving my ability to write well - overrode all other concerns.

For one class, the professor brought in a tool that looked like something from a medieval peasant village - it resembled a huge pair of ancient pliers. We were told to describe what it did1 in preparation for an assignment where we had to explain, in detail, how a common, everyday modern invention worked - something like a microwave or an alarm clock. I chose a stapler. My piece read like an instruction manual. I'll never forget his comment: "Okay, now how would you get someone to actually read this?" A lightbulb went off about the importance of an authentic audience, something never emphasized in my high school classes.

Often, internal motivation does not arise anywhere near a classroom. Remember a time when you tried to pick up a new skill for no reason except your own interest. Maybe it was a new language, an instrument, or a hobby like amateur photography. In those cases, the feedback was self-evident - could you talk to a stranger, play the chord, or take a picture that looked good? If so, you were learning. There was no grade. You pushed yourself solely because of a desire to learn and get better. I wanted to learn how to write a description of how a stapler worked that a reader would find worthwhile.

What scares me when I think about that course today is whether I would have handed the whole problem - observe the stapler, then explain how it works - to an LLM. I like to think that, because of the seriousness with which I approached the class, I would have abstained.

I have been told over and over by kids today that there is an easy solution to the cheating crisis if demonstrating whether the student actually learned the material is the true goal of the professor - all assessments need to be done in analog under teacher supervision. But that still mostly presumes external motivation.

On one level, that saddens me because I’ve also been told by students that when a teacher does rise to the occasion, when they make the course material come alive and infuse their classes with purpose, students want to do the work. They want to learn because it’s been made real for them. That was my experience in that freshman writing course. It is still possible.

Teachers who can genuinely inspire, coach, advise, and redirect students to master their area of expertise will become even more valuable in the AI era.

Despite so many stories about student cheating with AI and the lengths to which educators are going to prevent it, I wonder if we can look harder at our own practice. Thousands of teachers around the country routinely lead students to invest their best effort in their courses - whether it's algebra, chemistry, English, or computer science. As I frequently tell my debaters, if you are not convinced by your own argument, you can’t possibly expect to persuade someone else. If a teacher is not sincerely interested and invested in their subject matter, why should their students be?

In my experience, the teachers who tend to draw students in are passionate and highly trained in their field, model lifelong learning, are fair, and demonstrate care for their students. They are also, often, demanding. Even those qualities may not be enough to seed intrinsic motivation - what effective teachers do best is design the work differently.

In my own work, historical simulations and role-plays have had the most success turning the classroom into one where more students adopt an intrinsically motivated mindset. Students inhabit a real historical figure and compete in a goal-oriented activity with clear stakes and immediate feedback - the very conditions Csikszentmihalyi identified as conducive to flow. Those activities, often comprising a week or more, are the ones students bring up when they come back to visit years, sometimes decades later. It shocks me that I can often remember who they played and what they said. Simulations are flow classes for me as well.

I'm extremely fortunate. My class sizes are small, my school is well-resourced, and many of my students are highly motivated to begin with. Yet I still see the difference with these activities. I don't think most kids use AI to write their introductory speeches, position papers, or final reflections. I can't verify that with certainty, but the work is public - they deliver it in front of people who respond in real time - and the kids are invested.

Csikszentmihalyi makes a provocative claim about schooling later in the book:

Similarly the value of a school does not depend on its prestige, or its ability to train students to face up to the necessities of life, but rather on the degree of the enjoyment of lifelong learning it can transmit.

The “similarly” refers to his observation that the value of a community should be judged on the opportunities it affords its members to live to their full potential. Thus, Csikszentmihalyi views school as a place to cultivate the importance of learning above all else. Most educators, and Csikszentmihalyi himself, would agree that’s not happening in our current system.

Others might argue that school is a place to obtain skills first and foremost for their entry into society. Why can’t they do both? Why can’t students experience the joy of learning and acquire the necessary skills for work and for life? Too many students experience school as a place that extinguishes the joy of learning rather than celebrates it.

Most of us got into this because learning is not only beneficial and meaningful, but can be profoundly rewarding under the right circumstances. Summer is the time to remain idealistic - I know what happens when the reality of October hits. But as we walk back into classrooms over the next month or so, it's critical to remember that our job as educators is to create, preserve, and sustain those conditions for learning. Hopefully, even with the ability to produce answers and bypass flow just a click away, more students will experience the joy of learning intrinsically in classrooms explicitly designed for it.

Beyond this newsletter, I work directly with schools, educators, and other institutions about pedagogical questions raised by AI. Take a look at my website and reach out - I’d love to hear what you’re working on.