Publish at November 03 2009Updated February 05 2025
Making it fun changes behavior
Pleasure theory in action.
In Stockholm, as in most public places around the world, most people use escalators rather than steps to get from one floor to the next.
Except on one particular staircase, the Odenplan. Here, 66% of people use steps instead of escalators. Why do they do this? Because it's more fun, they have an effect, they create a little something...
Learning to read to access interesting reading, learning to write to produce interesting blogs, learning to count to manipulate relevant data, learning to build to achieve quality achievements... pleasure and aesthetics are fundamental motivating factors in learning.
The impulse comes from the individual, through his or her own will; not from outside pressure.
Play is an opportunity for pleasure, and aesthetics are also a source of pleasure.
Giving pleasure, doing with pleasure... Learning can be an opportunity for both.
Researchers striving for the pedagogical grail in the quest for ever-greater efficiency are on the wrong track... because the knowledge linked to environments and the people who make them up is contextual, never static, always in motion.
Teaching students a sense of balance in their lives. It's an important social issue, as it affects well-being and happiness by eliminating unhealthy stress.
In a society that prides itself on performance, isn't competition the reflection of a race against both oneself and others? What kind of performance are we talking about? Is it the one that pulls us upwards and makes us explore the best of ourselves, or is it the one that bends us under the yoke of systems of thought, driving us to exhaustion and sometimes forsaking our own aspirations along the way?
If it seems unthinkable to call students by a gender-neutral pronoun, Sweden has done it. Since the late 1990s, the Scandinavian country has respected the gender identity of both adults and children. While this is not always palpable in the general population, this giant step inspires other countries to follow suit.