A few days ago I was watching a video on YouTube from a guy named Louis who was talking about why kids hate reading and why public schools are to blame for that, and being someone who hates school and regrets the time spent learning a bunch of useless things, I can't agree more with what he said.
If you want to watch his video and hear exactly what his opinions are, here's the link:
I like reading, and I've discovered that when I was around 16 years old when my computer stopped working one day and I had nothing else to do but reading. It was my first time reading out of pleasure, out of curiosity, not out of obligation, and I loved it. Honestly, I didn't expect books to be so fun.
Since then I've been reading as much as I could, especially online, about all kind of subjects, and I'm always surprised by how many things I can learn by simply checking out how other people see some problems.
What's most important, is that my love for reading and my understanding of how important that activity is in today's world, didn't come from all the teachers that forced me to read book after book and then asked me what I understood.
Just like Louis said in his video, forcing anyone to learn something won't motivate that person to learn even more in their spare time, especially when they have no idea why they're learning all those things.
For example, when I was young I was going to school every day because my parents forced me, and I was doing my homework and learning stupid things because my teachers forced me to do it. But I didn't really know why I was there and why I was doing all those things until later in life.
And I'm pretty damn sure that most kids feel the same. They're in a building they don't want to be in, with people they may not like, being forced to learn a bunch of things they won't use anytime soon. There's no surprise that kids hate schools, and we shouldn't be surprised they hate books.
Learning should come as a natural way to satisfy some curiosity. I learned that in high school, when I started learning how to build websites. I wasn't particularly good at anything, and programming was surely something I sucked at. Yet somehow I managed to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript on my own, without anyone telling me to do it.
Why?
Because I was curious, and I wanted to learn how to build websites. Same thing with Photoshop - no one forced me to learn that software, but I did because I wanted to create cool things on my own.
Forcing someone to learn something, even if it's for their own good, is never gonna be as useful as that person learning the same thing on their own, out of curiosity. They will simply memorize whatever they need in order to make you "happy" and then they'll forget pretty much everything they learned.
What you can do instead, is making them curious, by either showing them examples of what you can do with the skills they can learn, or by impressing them with those skills. Forcing a kid to learn how to code without showing him exactly what he can achieve and just telling him "This is gonna help you in the future!" is never gonna be as useful as showing that kid a game and telling him "This is what you can do if you learn how to code. Would you like to make games?"
People don't work well when they are forced to do something. Instead, they make amazing progress when they do it out of a desire to work, to learn and to move forward. Instead of trying to find ways to force people to do "the right thing", be it learning or working, you should try to find ways to make them curious and to make them start learning on their own, out of a desire to do so, not because they have to.