The Education of Bill Gates

Bill Gates recently told Time Magazine that "Learning is mostly about creating a context for motivation".  The Gates Foundation often provides funding for educational programs, and it's interesting to see his driving principles.

I agree that motivation is the key, since kids spend more time practicing things they're interested in ("time on task" leads to skill).  But by reading between the lines, I can see that Gates is ignoring the politically sensitive issue that some kids have a harder time learning than others, because their motivations themselves are innately different.  In other words, you can't teach the ability to be motivated, you can only exploit motivations that already exist in people, which have to come from within.  Some people have the "right ones" for a successful schooling experience, and others don't.

I think Bill Gates is proposing the creation of temporary, motivational frameworks using technology and other means.  In other words, teachers should find something (anything!) that motivates a child (and it may have to be customized for each child), and then use that motivation to keep them interested in the actual subject you want them to learn.

Anyway, this is what I imagine Bill Gates is talking about.  If a child is motivated only by sports (but hates geography), the teacher would create a sports games that teaches him geography as a biproduct.  Sounds like a nice approach at first glance.

But I believe the personalization and customization for each child would be prohibitively expensive, even for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, due to differences in human nature among students.  Optimistically, Gates says in a recent Business Week article that "the setbacks don't mean they have squandered the $1 billion the foundation has spent so far."  Still, we may need to wait until version 3.0 of the program to get it right.