Judi commented on my post Thinking About Rules. I asked if students would react differently to rules that were imposed from without rather than within:

“Good question. I suspect that this differs among learners ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù that for some, having the rules imposed from outside is preferable, and for others, creating and following one?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s own rules is best. The ?¢‚Ǩ?ìLogo folks?¢‚Ǩ? tended to think that everyone was naturally a more self-directed learner than someone who needed structure imposed by someone else (e.g., a teacher). What we may never know is whether that?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s actually true about all of us, but the system of schooling has ?¢‚Ǩ?ìbeat it out?¢‚Ǩ? of us ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù or whether this truly is an individual difference, perhaps expressed differently at different times of our lives.”

Some of this goes to motivation. Csikzenmihalyi (Flow) would argue that in order to achieve flow, the motivation needs to be internal. He defines certain people as being autotelic personalities who draw their strength and motivation from internal rather than external sources: “The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.”

I would suspect that most students are influenced by some combination of external and internal motivation, and my observation has been that there are various combinations falling along a continuum from somone who is completely externally motivated and someone who is completely internally motivated. And I think people move along the continuum for each particular learning environment. An historical reenactor may have lots of internal motivation to learn about a certain era, but more external motivation may be needed to get him to take an accounting class that could lead to a raise.