Should Kids Love Learning?

• Should kids love learning? Is love even important? What actually matters?

• Is this about engagement, motivation, wellbeing, stupidogenesis or something else?

The Education Divide

• Peter Hyman: the education divide that’s fuelling broader societal fractures.

• Questions:

o Is love of learning only available to the privileged?

o Is “curiosity” a luxury or a universal right?

• Social class, cultural capital, vocational vs academic, compliant vs questioning.

• Are we educating students to be clever conformists or thoughtful dissenters?

• If learning is about fitting in with the system, how do we preserve space for voices that challenge the system?

• Is dissent too often mistaken for disruption in schools?

Has the Love of Learning Been Lost?

• Education Politics Substack: system squeezes joy out of discovery.

• Do children love learning, or just discovery when it feels voluntary?

• Has accountability (Ofsted, exams) killed off curiosity?

• Should “love” be central, or is that a distraction from rigour?

• Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Deci & Ryan: autonomy, competence, relatedness. Is “love of learning” really a by-product of system design, not an individual trait?

• How can schools create micro-environments of autonomy, competence, and relatedness even in a high-stakes culture?

The APPG Report

• All-Party Group on Love of Learning report.

• Key themes: curriculum narrowing, testing, wellbeing, disengagement.

• Can you legislate for “love”? Or is that sentimentalism?

• Is “love of learning” measurable? Or just rhetoric?

• What happens politically if schools churn out disengaged citizens?

• Hirsch (joy through mastery) vs progressives (joy through exploration). Do we aim to give children joy now (exploration) or joy later (mastery)? Or is it possible to design curricula that combine both — structured knowledge with space for wonder? Is “joy through mastery” a more honest aim than trying to make every lesson “fun”?

• Geary’s distinction: biologically primary vs secondary knowledge — kids may not “love” algebra, should we expect them to? maybe the goal shouldn’t be to make secondary knowledge feel fun, but to help students experience the delayed satisfaction that comes with having mastered it.

• Is “love” even the right word, or should we be talking about respect, perseverance, or meaning?

Should Kids Love Learning?

• Aristotle’s distinction between what’s pleasant and what’s good.

• Biesta: education as interruption of desire.

o If a child learns but never “loves,” is that failure?

o Do we confuse “loving learning” with “liking school”?

o Should schools prioritise joy now, or dividends later?

• Bjork on desirable difficulties — sometimes dislike in the moment = deeper love later. Bjork: “What enhances performance in the short term can often fail to support long-term learning.”

International Perspectives

• PISA/TIMSS on student attitudes.

• Finland (“joy in learning”) vs East Asia (high performance, high stress).

• Do we want kids to like school, or profit from it later?

• Is there a trade-off between love and mastery?

Towards Solutions

• What could change?

o Rebalance assessment: more formative, less punitive.

o Guarantee a broad entitlement: arts, play, philosophy.

o Restore teacher autonomy.

• Do we want citizens who can love, argue, and think — or workers who can comply?

Some links:

https://educationpolitics.substack.com/p/has-the-love-of-learning-been-lost?r=1rvl5x&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

https://peterhyman21.substack.com/p/the-education-divide-thats-fuelling?r=1rvl5x&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

https://educationappg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/APPG-LoL-Report.pdf

https://amzn.eu/d/fgWY2xB

Becky Francis chair of the Curriculum Review stated at Research Ed National Conference that ‘The review will not dumb down content, or infuse with issues or campaigns.’ Yet the review ‘will (her italics) ensure that every young person can see themselves in the curriculum, and that it challenges discrimination and extends horizons’

Is this contradictory? Arguably dumbing down content is achieved if you try to organise a curriculum in which every young person can see themselves. Not infusing a curriculum with issues or campaigns yet ensuring it challenges discrimination might also hint at a contradiction.

At the time of recording we don’t know how she will try to achieve these aims but let’s examine what the argument might be.

Seeing yourself in the curriculum is usually an identitarian call to arms in that curriculum material chosen and content covered should resist all being about dead white men. It should include more BAME representation, Women, ‘Otherwise abled’, LGBTQ, Working Class, ‘Young People’ etc. in a more positive and inclusive way.

What possibly could be an argument against? Cultural transmission: The distortions to the curriculum needed to ensure this representation mean that the ‘great books’, ‘our island story’, great works of art, music etc, works of science, historical moments of importance, are no longer the grand narrative of curriculum design so that certain ‘great works’ are ignored in order to make space for ‘DEI’ works that either do not live up to the level of the works they replace and/or disrupt the curriculum narrative so that the importance of what was happening in, say, the Crimean War is replaced by an undue focus on Mary Seacole.

Who could be against challenging discrimination? Well, I take it that discrimination is not seen as a bad thing because we want students to be discriminating in many ways. To favour certain things over other things. To develop a moral code, a sense of right and wrong, for example. But how far do we take this?

Schools are places where we have to guard against bullying against racism, inappropriate behaviour, anti-semitism etc. but do we get into grey areas when we start either choosing texts in order to make these policies clear? Is this dumbing down? Or interpreting texts to eke out the messages - for example setting an essay about What can Romeo and Juliet teach us about anti-racism?

What is our attitude towards Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Netanyahu, Putin, Jeremy Corbyn, Sultana and that bloke from the Greens? etc. Or are all acceptable?

Where do we draw the lines? Should We Draw Lines?

Can we teach students how to disagree agreeably?

What is the state of our nation (UK) and how does this impact our schools and colleges?

Is our national/international situation so fraught and anxiety inducing that young people are over-anxious? Is this made worse by socail media and the us vs them that seems to be dominating a lot of the online space?

Are schools suitably ‘dialogic’ are we able to develop schools where dialectic and discussion is the centrepiece - teaching them how to take their place in ‘The Great Conversation of Humankind’?

Is there hope? How can schools help young people to see the humanity in each other, even those with whom you vehemently disagree?