I believe that there's a high level of connectivity, causality in the things that we count as successes and failures in our world. Things that we value very highly are parenting, education, fulfilling lives (and occupations, ideally), peace, prosperity and lots of other high level ideas that are easy to long for, but hard to achieve. Through cognitive psychology, we've begun to learn to break down what we react to positively to very small building blocks, things like relating to others, feeling autonomous, observing fairness, feeling certain about our future, at least in the short-term, if not longer.

In education, a significant set of research has shown that we are born with an inclination to learn and seek knowledge, to explore our environment and understand it. However, the systems and policies we put in place assume the opposite, and go to great lengths to add external motivators in the forms of punishment, rewards, competition and tests. These attempts, we are now discovering, achieve the opposite of the desired effect. They diminish the original intrinsic motivation, only amplifying the apparent need for additional extrinsic motivation, and an unfortunate cycle results.