Bravo, bravo, and bravo! Motivation is key
Yesterday, we were reading this post in the ptqk blogzine, which reflects on the introduction of “hacker ethics” in the workplace; as ptqk explains: “Companies no longer want workers like they used to, obedient and dull, the kind who say, ‘I work for money; my real life is outside the office.’ The opposite of that is the hacker: someone who loves what they do, has no set hours, is self-taught and imaginative, and values freedom and independence more than money. .” So, we can say that companies effectively want “workers with a hacker spirit.” It also seems very true to us, as ptqk says, that “the hacker worker model is copied directly from the culture sector” (in this regard, the reflections of
Andrew Ross
, which he cites in the post, are very interesting).
Coincidentally, days ago, we participated in the thread of enthusiastic comments that followed another entry, this time on Juan Freire’s blog, about “motivation as the key to the success of education,” which was related to John Maeda’s management at the head of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). It is very easy to establish a direct relationship between that worker model with a hacker spirit and that of the motivated student; in fact,
Alfredo Romeo
(founder and director of the company
Blobject
) wrote in one of the comments: ” Change students for workers and apply the same discourse. In a way, that is what we are trying to do at Blobject. That the workers who work with us do so because they really want to, not because there is nothing else on the market. “. If there is one trait that characterizes the “worker with a hacker spirit,” it is the passion and motivation in their work, which constitute the main incentive to accept “long working hours in exchange for gratification and who is willing to give their free time and thoughts in exchange for mobility and autonomy.”
It seems to us that the most significant thing about this whole matter is that the model, effectively proven in the cultural sector for decades, is being transferred not only to the creative industries or cognitive work sector but to the labor market as a whole; it is enough to attend a “motivation” meeting-harangue for door-to-door salespeople of mobile phone services to realize this.
What one learned in school was not really mathematics, language, history, and those things, but the habit of obedience, of individual work in silence, the fulfillment of schedules and assigned tasks, and the respect of a hierarchy. These things constituted the
So, is the demotivated student a counter-hegemonic figure? Of course not, but then how to resolve this paradox? It seems to us that what is necessary is to say: motivation yes, but for what? And it would not be a question of establishing a vertical mechanism that decides from above what is the good use of creativity, autonomy, and motivation, but of creating devices and generating processes of dialogue and negotiation with the students themselves about what should be the object of these capacities.