From P. J. Finn (2009) Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in Their Own Self-interest. Pp 194-195.

If students want to learn something because they are intensely interested in it, the way some people are interested in computers or history, for example, thats called intrinsic motivation because the reward comes from learning for its own sake. If students want to learn something because they want to get a good grade, or graduate, or go to a good college, but otherwise, theyre not much interested, thats called extrinsic motivation because the reward comes from outside the learning itself. After the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s a third kind of motivation was suggestedMachiavellian motivation.1 If you go to an overcrowded high school where fewer than half the teachers are fully certified and more than half the students drop out, and you live in a part of town where unemployment is double the regional average, and housing is substandard, and nearly everyone is without health insurance, and your little sister goes to a school where they just paved the playground for a teachers parking lot, and you want to become better educated and learn the discourse of power (perhaps becoming a union member or activist or organizer or teacher or lawyer or office holder with a passion for social justice) so you can fight to get families like yours a better deal, thats Machiavellian motivation. But Machiavellian suggests duplicity and deceit. I believe that the kind of motivation described here has more to do with Freire than with Machiavelli, and so I prefer to call it Freirean motivation Motivation plays an interesting role in poor and working-class schools. Most teachers in these schools do not think much about intrinsic motivation (except, perhaps, to wish the students had it), but they talk about extrinsic motivation a lot (and also wish the students had it). They repeatedly refer to learning things because they will be on the test. When they find outstanding students they encourage them with the promise of going to college and by inference joining the middle class. These are, of course, potential border crossers, students who are willing, perhaps eager, to adopt middle-class values, attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and ways of communicating and

abandon their own. This is far different from Freirean motivation. Working-class students with Freirean motivation may learn middle-class values, attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and language, but not to replace their own. Instead, they learn to operate in middle-class or even executive elite cultures in order to beat the middle-class and executive elite at its own game and thereby address the inequities and injustices suffered by their own communities, the way organized labor and the old Democratic Party once did in order to effect government policy and to stand up to corporations and big money interests. _____________
1

Oller, J. & Perkins, K. (1978). Intelligence and language proficiency as sources of variance in selfreported affective variables. Language Learning, 28, pp. 85-97.