Toying around with a hypothesis...
A common theme recently is dealing with our kids and their reactions to homework/avoidance. Looking at some of the homework DS6 brings home, I'm not always clear on the purpose. But school made me quite the skeptic.
Schools give repetitive work to take home and sink ideas in further. Many of our kids have a bad reaction to it. They are intrinsically motivated by learning. They are in the process of developing or have already developed learning strategies that work for themselves. They've done a great job and are the sorts of self-starters businesses seem to clamor for.
What does the school do? Punishes them.
Part of why they learn so well is they have a drive to discover, understand, and learn new things. They work ideas over, make connections, draw conclusions and truly learn the material. Repetition is the antithesis of that drive. And it feels like punishment (and one of the worse possible punishments for someone driven to understand the whole world.)
If it feels like punishment, then what in their mind is being punished? Skilled, active learning. The effort they put in at the time the material was presented to fully understand it in the first place.
So what is the outcome of this operant conditioning?
