Why Don't Students Like School?

Contrary to popular belief, the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to save you from having to think, because the brain is actually not very good at thinking.Thinking is slow and unreliable. Nevertheless, people enjoy mental work if it is successful. People like to solve problems, but not to work on unsolvable problems. If schoolwork is always just a bit too difficult for a student, it should be no surprise that she doesn’t like school much.

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People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.

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The implication of this principle is that teachers should reconsider how they encourage their students to think, in order to maximize the likelihood that students will get the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought.

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Shakespeare extolled our cognitive ability in Hamlet: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!” Some three hundred years later, however, Henry Ford more cynically observed, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.”* They both had a point. Humans are good at certain types of reasoning, particularly in comparison to other animals, but we exercise those abilities infrequently. A cognitive scientist would add another observation: Humans don’t think very often because our brains are designed not for thought but for the avoidance of thought. Thinking is not only effortful, as Ford noted, it’s also slow and unreliable. 

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Your brain serves many purposes, and thinking is not the one it serves best.

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So far I’ve described two ways in which your brain is set up to save you from having to think. First, some of the most important functions (for example, vision and movement) don’t require thought: you don’t have to reason about what you see; you just immediately know what’s out in the world. Second, you are biased to use memory to guide your actions rather than to think. But your brain doesn’t leave it there; it is capable of changing in order to save you from having to think. If you repeat the same thought-demanding task again and again, it will eventually become automatic; your brain will change so that you can complete the task without thinking about it.


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Despite the fact that we’re not that good at it, we actually like to think.We are naturally curious, and we look for opportunities to engage in certain types of thought. But because thinking is so hard, the conditions have to be right for this curiosity to thrive, or we quit thinking rather readily.


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There is a sense of satisfaction, of fulfillment, in successful thinking. In the last ten years neuroscientists have discovered that there is overlap between the brain areas and chemicals that are important in learning and those that are important in the brain’s natural reward system. Many neuroscientists suspect that the two systems are related. Rats in a maze learn better when rewarded with cheese.When you solve a problem, your brain may reward itself with a small dose of dopamine, a naturally occurring chemical that is important to the brain’s pleasure system. Neuroscientists know that dopamine is important in both systems—learning and pleasure—but haven’t yet worked out the explicit tie between them. Even though the neurochemistry is not completely understood, it seems undeniable that people take pleasure in solving problems.

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Mental work appeals to us because it offers the opportunity for that pleasant feeling when it succeeds. But not all types of thinking are equally attractive. People choose to work crossword puzzles but not algebra problems.

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Thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain. Nevertheless, people like to think—or more properly, we like to think if we judge that the mental work will pay off with the pleasurable feeling we get when we solve a problem. So there is no inconsistency in claiming that people avoid thought and in claiming that people are naturally curious—curiosity prompts people to explore new ideas and problems, but when we do, we quickly evaluate how much mental work it will take to solve the problem. If it’s too much or too little, we stop working on the problem if we can.

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So what’s the solution? Give the student easier work? You could, but of course you’d have to be careful not to make it so easy that the student would be bored. And anyway, wouldn’t it be better to boost the student’s ability a little bit? Instead of making the work easier, is it possible to make thinking easier?

In sum, successful thinking relies on four factors: information from the environment, facts in long-term memory, procedures in long-term memory, and the amount of space in working memory. If any one of these factors is inadequate, thinking will likely fail. 

Let me summarize what I've said in this chapter. People's minds are not especially well-suited to thinking; thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain. For this reason, deliberate thinking does not guide people's behavior in most situations. Rather,  we rely on our memories, following courses of action that we have taken before. 

Nevertheless, we find successful thinking pleasurable. We like solving problems, understanding new ideas, and so forth. Thus, we will seek out opportunities to think, but we are selective in doing so; we choose problems that pose some challenge but that seem likely to be solvable, because these are the problems that lead to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. For problems to be solved, the thinker needs adequate information from the environment, room in working memory, and the required facts and procedures in long-term memory.