Should kids 'love' learning?

Why “love of learning” may be the wrong ambition and what schools should pursue instead

Another week, another episode of It’s Your Time You’re Wasting. In this one, Martin And I discuss whether children should be expected to love learning.

You can also listen to the podcast here.

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The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Education has released a report entitled Inquiry into The Loss of Love of Learning.’ As well as being an uncomfortable mouthful, the report raises a curious question: should children love learning? At first glance, the answer is surely “yes.” Who would oppose the idea of children loving to learn? But as soon as we press on the word “love” the ground begins to shift beneath our feet. Do we mean delight, joy, curiosity, or passion? Or do we mean something more enduring, like commitment or devotion? Love is slippery. The danger of sentimental language is that it obscures more than it reveals.

The APPG inquiry finds that many children’s curiosity and engagement are being squeezed out by a system dominated by high-stakes tests, narrow curricula, and teacher burnout. Attendance is fragile, wellbeing is low, and creative subjects are sidelined in favour of examinable ‘basics.’ Students describe anxiety around exams and a sense of irrelevance in what they study. Teachers, meanwhile, feel stripped of autonomy and overloaded by accountability, with attrition rates climbing.

The report’s central claim is that love of learning is not a luxury but a barometer of system health. Where it is absent, structural pressures are at fault. It calls for a lighter, less rigid curriculum, rebalanced assessment with more formative elements, restored professional trust for teachers, and renewed investment in arts, play, and wellbeing.

The Education Divide

Peter Hyman, co-founder of School 21, former Downing Street strategist and current government advisor of education, describes what he calls the education divide, a rift that both reflects and intensifies wider social fractures. For the affluent, schools are often designed to foster cultural capital and safe spaces for curiosity. Debate is tolerated, dissent is rehearsed, and difference is contained. For the disadvantaged, the emphasis falls on compliance. Here the dominant message is: follow instructions, pass the test, stay out of trouble. In one world, questioning authority is a habit of mind; in the other, it risks being read as disruption.

This is not simply about who loves learning and who does not. It is about whether schools themselves communicate that learning belongs to everyone, or whether they reinforce the impression that real learning is reserved for those already privileged enough to afford it. The hierarchy between academic and vocational routes makes the point more sharply: university is valorised, while technical or craft pathways are too often seen as consolation prizes. No wonder some children conclude that learning is not for them.

The squeeze of accountability

The APPG report notes what many teachers have long felt: the high-stakes culture of Ofsted inspections, performance tables, and exams has squeezed the joy out of education. Children may love learning when it feels voluntary, but once reduced to a series of test-prep drills, their experience of school becomes something more akin to endurance than love.

But hang on, if a love of learning has been lost, when precisely was it possessed? To claim that something has been lost implies there was once a golden age when children brimmed with unquenchable curiosity and schools nurtured it. But history is thin on evidence. Victorian classrooms were hardly hotbeds of playful exploration; the cane did not encourage wonder. Mid-twentieth century schooling was often about discipline, conformity, and preparation for work. Even the much-romanticised 1960s and 70s, with their “child-centred” reforms, saw plenty of disaffection, truancy, and complaints about falling standards. Certainly when I was a school boy during the 80s I can’t recall more joy, wonder or nurturing of curiosity. The only reason I turned up at school was to hang out with friends and wish I was brave enough to chat up girls.

Perhaps “loss” is a rhetorical device. What’s really being described is a shift in how the system makes its trade-offs. Accountability regimes, league tables, and exam metrics have intensified since the 1990s, crowding out space for whimsy and idiosyncrasy. Maybe t’s not that a love of learning once flourished and then died, but that the conditions which might allow it to thrive have been systematically eroded?

If there was no golden age, we should stop pining for one and ask what makes love of learning more or less likely in the present. That moves the question from sentiment to structure. On that score, Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory is useful. They argue that intrinsic motivation (a plausible stand-in for ‘love of learning’) depends on three conditions: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Remove these and motivation dries up. The implication is striking: love of learning is not an innate spark possessed by the fortunate few. It is a product of system design. A system that strips autonomy, undermines competence, and isolates students will kill off curiosity. The challenge is to design classrooms where autonomy, competence, and relatedness can survive, even in a climate of high-stakes accountability.

Joy today or joy tomorrow?

But perhaps we should not expect children always to love what they are doing in school. We should, perhaps, contrast joy through mastery with joy through exploration. Progressives often prize exploration, the thrill of discovery, while traditionalists insist on mastery, the satisfaction of grasping difficult content. Both forms of joy are real, but they operate on different timescales. Exploration is immediate; mastery is delayed. The question is not which form of joy is “better” but whether our system can design a curriculum that balances the two.

Cognitive science adds another twist. David Geary distinguishes between biologically primary knowledge (things we are predisposed to enjoy, like gossip or play) and biologically secondary knowledge (things we have to be taught, like algebra). Expecting children to “love” algebra is a bit like expecting them to love tidying their bedroom: it may be possible, but it is not natural. Perhaps the aim - certainly if we want children to be able to delay gratification - is not to manufacture delight in the moment, but to teach children how to endure frustration in order to reap the delayed satisfaction of mastery.

Robert Bjork’s work on desirable difficulties sharpens this still further. The very conditions that make learning feel less enjoyable in the short term often make it stick in the long term. Struggle, spacing, and interleaving depress performance today but enhance retention tomorrow. What might feel like drudgery may later be reinterpreted as love. The love of learning, in this sense, is retrospective. It arises when students look back and realise that the hard things they once disliked are now theirs to command.

The language of love

Perhaps the problem is not with learning, but with love. Aristotle distinguished between what is pleasant and what is good. Education, he would remind us, is not about gratifying desire but about cultivating virtue. In What is the Educational Task? Arousing the Desire for Wanting to Exist in the World in a Grown-Up Way, Gert Biesta takes this further, arguing that education should interrupt desire, not satisfy it. Schools should not aim to give children what they already want but to expose them to what they could not otherwise imagine wanting. In this frame, a child who learns but never “loves” may not be a failure at all, but someone who has been taught that knowledge is worth pursuing for reasons deeper than mere momentary preference.

There is also a category error to guard against. To love learning is not the same as to like school. It is perfectly possible to hate school while still hungering for knowledge. Equally, it is possible to enjoy school while never experiencing the transformative power of mastery. Love of learning cannot be reduced to a slogan about making lessons fun.

What, then, should we do? The APPG report offers familiar remedies: rebalance assessment away from the punitive, restore teacher autonomy, guarantee a broad entitlement to arts, play, and philosophy. These are worthy aims, but they miss the deeper question: what is the purpose of education? Do we want citizens who can argue, dissent, and think? Or workers who can comply, perform, and serve? If the former, then love of learning is not an optional extra but a democratic necessity. If the latter, then love of learning will remain a luxury for the privileged.

This leaves us with an unsettling conclusion. Love of learning cannot be legislated, nor can it be demanded. It emerges only in conditions where autonomy, competence, and relatedness are protected, where mastery is valued as highly as exploration, and where dissent is not mistaken for disruption. The real question is not whether children should love learning, but whether our education system deserves to be loved.