It's not just a "kind of person" who wants personal relevance to what they're learning. It's human nature for learning to take place naturally and effortlessly

It's not just a "kind of person" who wants personal relevance to what they're learning. It's human nature for learning to take place naturally and effortlessly when there is a felt purpose and relevance. For all humans. The problem with this in schools, is that you can't actually generate this sense of purpose (which is a feeling, emotional) for arbitrary subject-student pairings. What do when it fails? The strategy is, they TRY to generate the sense of purpose (maybe not try that hard, after years of failure and burnout), but fall back to the emotion of fear as primary coordinator/motivator for everything. They make students afraid to look stupid in the short term, and afraid of an abstract "bad future" ("flipping burgers") in the long term. They introduce the system of grades for 3 whole years of middle school, when the grades serve no purpose (they're not used by colleges) but to generate the fear-based emotional economy of the school. Fear is the primary emotional mechanism of the school. For every kind of person, this is worse educationally than felt purposeful engagement.