Can acquiring knowledge be easy and fun? Are stress-free schools and effortless teaching conceivable? It’s not that simple. The human brain likes hardship, even if it is very defensive about it.
A teenager comes home from school in the afternoon, devours their lunch, and then sits down to their lesson. The lamp on the desk stays on late; the pen scrapes against the paper. Equations are being solved, dates are being written, gaps are being filled in, words are being memorised, and material is being repeated. This image of school is deeply imprinted on us. We derisively call it the “Prussian school” because it was Prussia that, in 1819, was the first in Europe to introduce universal compulsory education (admittedly after earlier regional attempts). “Coercion,” we say with disgust today, and we want to see it as a privilege to a lesser and lesser extent.
Exams, tests, admissions, high school exams, and studies—each of these stages is considered extremely important in school culture. Thus, the student is obligated to constantly prepare—that is, to make an effort. On average, it takes twelve years. It is also common knowledge that school imparts knowledge that should be consolidated at home. After lessons, you have to “catch up” with the unfinished material because another traditional duty is taken very seriously—checking progress. On the one hand, parents demand good results and diligence from their children, and, on the other, they want to provide them with a happy and carefree childhood. Libertarian views are becoming more and more popular: abolish compulsory schooling, ban homework. We also like to say that school is not work and students often work harder than an average worker because after a few—usually six or seven—hours spent at desks, they still fill in exercise books, solve mathematical problems, or take private lessons.
But let us leave for a moment the institution of the school with its centuries-old defects and consider whether we should really be so eager to free children from the labor of learning. Is effortless education even possible?
Made to Learn
“The natural selection of our species has focused on the competence to assimilate, store and exchange information. The human brain is made for learning,” explains Marek Kaczmarzyk, professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. As a biologist and author of many publications in the field of neurodidactics, he explains the matter from the perspective of an evolutionist: “We can consider learning as the foundation of human adaptation through evolution. It’s what has given us an advantage over other species, allowing us to survive and adapt to changing and constantly new conditions.”
The process of remembering is nothing more than the production of new neural connections in the brain. Therefore, doesn’t learning with rules require work? “Like any physiological process, it is an effort for the brain,” explains Professor Kaczmarzyk. “Just like moving your hand, for example. However, I would prefer to call this kind of effort ‘energy expenditure,’ and the effort that accompanies learning is more of an ‘extra effort,’ i.e., something that the student is forced to do by circumstances or by someone from the outside.”
Teachers have no doubts. “You can’t learn anything without effort. Sometimes it’s tedious and sometimes it’s exciting, but there’s no other way to achieve results,” says Marta Florkiewicz-Borkowska, an educational trainer, art therapist, and recipient of the 2017 Teacher of the Year award by a Polish teachers’ magazine. Even when she learns English on her own, she sees the greatest progress when she is very committed. “No matter how active I am and how interesting my lesson is, I don’t move forward unless I put in the effort, even outside of class,” she says. Professionally, she teaches German. She does not assign the obligatory homework—it is only for those who want it. The only thing that she requires students to do is to consolidate the material: “I expect them to repeat the vocabulary and read what was in class.” However, as she admits, more and more often she senses that for young people, even repeating the vocabulary is too much of a duty and an unwanted compulsion robbing them of time for pleasure.
“Effort is one thing, and torture resulting from performing meaningless, derivative tasks or forty-five minutes of a tedious lesson is another,” warns Anna Turula, PhD, Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the KEN University in Kraków, and an expert in foreign language teaching. “Repeating vocabulary is essential if we want to learn foreign languages. But in itself memorizing them may prove fruitless if the pupil does not see any point in it; if they are not convinced that the effort will be useful to them.” It turns out that the effort simply has to pay off.
But what happens when there is a lot of tension in the effort? At school, this is an everyday reality that has recently been observed and analyzed more and more closely. School stress often overwhelms and paralyzes. As research shows, children now react to it with depression and nervous breakdowns much more often than those in their parents’ generation.
Good Stress
There is such a thing as motivational stress, otherwise known as eustress. In this case, the main role is played by adrenaline, which temporarily improves almost every function of the body: it raises blood pressure, deepens breathing, and strengthens muscles. It also increases blood supply to the brain, which helps it work faster and more effectively. Motivational stress is a situation in which someone gives you a task and you know that you have the competence to complete it. You know it is going to be hard, but, with a little effort, you can do it. You’re stressed, but you’re also thinking more clearly than usual. You have a positive attitude to action, the adrenaline drives you, and, when you achieve your goal, you feel euphoric. With the release of dopamine and endorphins, the brain rewards you for your effort. This is an example of an ideal situation in which stress is used exactly the way it was “invented” through evolution.
However, it is worse if we exceed the limits of eustress. This can happen when the upsetting situation lasts too long, or the tension is so strong that the adrenal glands begin to produce cortisol and aldosterone. Then, instead of mild stimulation, the body reacts by fleeing, fighting, or freezing. You are unable to take on the challenge, you try to isolate yourself from it, or you question its reasonableness altogether; you want to avoid it at all costs. The teacher asks a question, and this paralyzes you. You sit down to write a test and your mind goes blank. You skip school because you don’t see the point in facing too big a problem. “There is a very fine line between motivating and harmful stress. In addition, individual immunity varies,” Professor Kaczmarzyk points out. So it would be difficult to develop universal conditions that would help everyone swim safely within the limits of eustress without being exposed to overwhelming fear. Although there is one universal piece of advice: “This is a principle that should apply in every school: respect for the child, whose socialization process should give them the chance to discover what they are good at and ensure their development in this direction,” he emphasizes. The school is supposed to support students and help them where they encounter difficulties, not to force everyone into the same framework. A change in mindset alone would save both students and teachers a lot of negative emotions.
And Why Do I Need It?
If we were to ask teachers what doubts their pupils raise with them most often, we would hear that students complain that some part of the material is of no use to them in life. “Why do I need this?” they ask. And it’s not entirely unfounded. When I ask students to indicate what should be changed in the educational system, they answer that uninteresting and useless information should be removed from the curricula. Regardless of their age or the next education reform introduced by politicians, they repeat together that there are a lot of unnecessary things being taught.
The students’ answers only differ when I ask them what exactly they would like to remove. In summary, math lovers would prefer not to read books, and humanists would be happy to get rid of physics. Generally speaking, no one likes the paramecium, and they would prefer to count on a calculator without having to cram a multiplication table. It would be difficult to single out one group of useless material that all the rebels would vote for excluding—just as it would not be easy to identify such material that would not be difficult for everyone equally but would be a pleasure.
“The latest research on the brain shows that the environment and conditions which we create for learning—as well as what the students are supposed to learn and with what attitude they approach it—play a key role in what a student remembers and whether they will learn willingly or with effort,” says Professor Kaczmarzyk. “Therefore, it is impossible to find an answer to the question of whether it is possible to create such conditions in which every person would be able to learn any content with equal pleasure and ease.”
What contributes to the fact that some tasks tire us faster and others make us last longer? When we like something, when we enjoy it, or (even better) when we are successful in it, then we are eager to deepen our knowledge in a given area. In other words, we learn it more willingly and effectively. But is it really only about pleasure?
The US social psychologist Roy Baumeister compares the brain during exercise (when we think, when we try to control our emotions or we motivate ourselves to some action, i.e., we use willpower and determination) to working muscles. He argues that, even though the brain is not a muscle, it loses its efficiency when tired, just like our legs carrying us on a long march or our hands carrying furniture during a move. But also, Baumeister believes, just like in the case of muscles, the brain can be trained and accustomed to working harder. Analogously to weightlifting athletes, who increase the strength of their muscles by successively adding another disc to the barbell, the brain, stimulated and forced to work, increases its capabilities.
But how do you train your brain? What makes us remember some information better than other? Marek Kaczmarzyk lists five features that determine this. The first is usefulness. This is the answer to the students’ question “Why do I need it?” At the same time, it turns out that saying “This will be useful to you in the future” is a mistake. The message that the information may be needed at some point—but it is not known when and under what circumstances—automatically puts the information in the “superfluous” box. The brain will absorb such information lazily, reluctantly, because it will decide that it simply does not need it. For the brain, the abstract “someday” is not important.
The second feature is that the brain likes novelty. The third is related to it: the brain also likes surprises, which is why it is much easier to remember an anecdote with a good punch line than an encyclopedic definition. The fourth characteristic, the essential feature of information that we would like to leave in the brain for a long time, is cause and effect. Over the course of evolution, the human brain has become accustomed to the fact that, in order to plan for the future, it must notice a pattern in the present and the past. It will therefore resist isolated messages without context, foreign words, or dates detached from the sequence of events. In the first instance, the brain will assimilate the information that it associates with something.
Finally, the fifth characteristic: the brain is eager to absorb the information about humans as a species. That’s why rumors perpetuate so quickly.
The knowledge presented in the way that meets these five conditions will be easily assimilated by the brain—it will interest the brain and thus, arouse motivation for further exploration in this area. And then we will feel that we are learning with pleasure.
Ease and Fun
“The simplest theory of human nature is that we work like hell to avoid such experiences [effort and suffering]. We pursue pleasure and comfort; we expect to go through life without pain,” says Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, in his best-selling book The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. He defines this characteristic of the human race as the law of least work. He writes: “Who would not wish they had more willpower to fight reaching for junk food and other temptations? Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t get upset and waste time on social media? How great would it be to be able to work on tasks for as long as you want without being distracted by email, the fridge, or the sofa?”
While, in the case of physical exertion, the body informs us when it has had enough, the brain communicates its overload in a completely different way. After all, we don’t faint from an excess of math assignments. However, when things get too hard for us, we can’t absorb more knowledge and we give up. Bloom wonders why mental exertion is often unpleasant. And he adopts Robert Kurzban’s theory, which is based on the concept of the so-called opportunity cost—or the cost of lost opportunities—taken from economics. When we decide where to direct our forces, we give up on using them for another purpose, for other tasks. In other words: we gain something, but we also lose something. Translating this into the principles of the functioning of the human body: while physical fatigue is based on the loss of actual resources—the muscles go limp, the heart cannot keep up with pumping the blood, and the legs swell—in the case of mental effort, we are burdened by what we lose when, for example, we study in the evenings or sit in a boring lecture.
Let Us Enjoy the Difficulties
This, of course, does not prove that the student does not have a chance to understand and consolidate the material just because they could be doing something that their brain would find more valuable. However, this means that the student will have to make more of an effort. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
“In life, we also have to learn things that are less pleasant for us,” says Professor Kaczmarzyk. “Some important information at school cannot be formulated and presented in such a way that our brains automatically want to learn it. Sometimes it is necessary information that will later make it easier to understand other issues—for example, chemical or physical processes. On the other hand, it is worth trying to choose the content in school curricula in moderation, and, wherever possible, to present it in a form that is as attractive as possible to the human brain.”
However, it is not possible to standardize and adapt curricula in such a way that everything comes easily to everyone. Most of us will learn many things with difficulty. Is that bad? As psychologist Angela Duckworth argues in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance: “Talent counts, but effort counts twice.” The author cites an example of the writer John Irving, who “at the end of high school, got minus C in English. In the language section of the SAT, he scored 475 out of 800.” For this reason, he repeated the year. But he wasn’t lazy or stupid—he was just dyslexic. Years later, he recalled that, for a task that took his colleagues an hour, he needed three. Despite this, he did not give up, and, thanks to his extraordinary stubbornness, he became one of the most recognizable contemporary writers. “Talent without effort is just unmet potential,” Duckworth concludes.
In the end, Paul Bloom didn’t just focus on why we get tired. He was more interested in what makes us consciously choose something hard, even with pleasure. At this point, he referred to the theory of the paradox of effort. It is based on the fact that striving hard for something, even if it seems too hard, can give us greater satisfaction than achieving the goal that we reach easily. “Under certain conditions and in the right doses, physical and mental pain, struggle, failure, and finally loss, are what we need. ( . . . ) Effort makes the fruits of our labor sweeter,” Bloom writes.
If, despite the difficulties, we manage to achieve the goal, we feel great satisfaction. “Theoretically, you could decide: I won’t learn what I don’t enjoy and what generally requires effort. But then you would miss out on one of the basic conditions of well-being, which is a sense of agency. It appears just when you overcome difficulties and achieve your goal in spite of everything,” says Professor Kaczmarzyk.
It has been known for a long time that the more effort we put into something, the more we value it. So maybe by freeing students from the burden of acquiring knowledge, we will also deprive them of a sense of joy and satisfaction from the achieved goal?
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