We can now turn to recommendations. No simple remedies are involved, nor just a few, but hopefully workable ones nonetheless. There is no easy way out of the problems caused by the massive default of education that faces America today, but there are at least some constructive avenues to pursue. We have anticipated these recommendations to a greater or lesser extent. It is time to draw them together into a single, unified proposal.

To recap, we argued from the outset in favor of John Dewey's observation (1938/1963) that “the most important attitude that can be formed [in schools] is that of the desire to go on learning” (p. 48). Our analysis of achievement motivation led to a set of instructional guidelines intended to foster the will to learn, which depends largely on viewing motives as goals. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges for schools today is to rearrange the prevailing incentive systems to promote intrinsic goals such as playful curiosity and to establish meaningful payoffs in the struggle for self-improvement (Maehr, 1976, 1989).

Then, to complete our analysis, we added a distinctively cognitive element to these motivational concerns, something also anticipated by Dewey (1938/1963) when he remarked that “all which the school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned, is to develop their capacity to think” (p. 152).