Tormented regularly by this passage from Holt's How Children Fail: "This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties…usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true."
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I'm sure I'm seeing a sliver of the tip of the iceberg here, but what's the alternative? Letting children choose? They'll choose Netflix and ice cream 24/7 😅
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Holt sketches some solutions in his books (see also Dewey, Bruner, Illich, Egan, Papert, etc), but the short of it in my estimation is "we don't know, exactly." eg Montessori classrooms are an improvement along many axes for young children but hasn't "scaled" well to older kids…
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