What is it about school life that drives the hurtful, destructive dynamics that subvert the joy of learning and creates such a profound conflict between ability and effort as sources of worth? Many answers have been offered, but none comes as close to the mark as that implied by John Krumboltz's mocking challenge (1990): “Imagine how we would go about designing an educational program if our purpose were to make students hate to learn.” First, Krumboltz suggests, “we would not involve them [students] in establishing the purposes of their class.” Second, “we would require them to perform some impossible tasks – for example, to be perfect in everything they do. Third, when we discovered that the students were failing to master the impossible tasks, we would ridicule them and report their mistakes, failures and shortcomings to their friends and relatives.”

It is hard to improve on this formula if the purpose is to make learning unpleasant, yet ironically – and, of course, this is Krumboltz's point – these are precisely the circumstances that prevail in many schools today and help explain why children become alienated from school, hate teachers and learning, vandalize school property, and drop out as soon as they can. But no one wants to make learning unpleasant, not deliberately anyway. So why do we treat children this way?