Douglas Wilson wrote a banger on education where he persuasively shows that a student enjoying themselves now is a bad goal:

We tend to evaluate educational progress by the wrong criteria. Instead of evaluating the work to be done, and then working to bring our children to the point where they can do it, we go the other way. We ask, “How much work can my children do while still enjoying themselves?”

The Bible teaches that he who is slothful in his work is a brother to him who is a great destroyer (Prov. 18:9). Those who substitute anything for work in education are enemies and destroyers of education. The motives may be “good,” but the consequences are always the same. Now of course this is not a call for grim faces in education. But we must stop trying to get our children to enjoy themselves, and begin teaching them to enjoy their work. If we permit, for whatever reason, slothfulness in education, we are destroying education. And because we are destroying the education of our children, we are in fact attacking our children. 

For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one examine his own work and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load (Gal. 6:3-5). We must teach our children to guard against self-deception as they consider the academic work they do. In contrast to this, our government’s educational establishment has set up, as one of their primary objectives, the inculcation of such self-deception. “We want all the kids to feel good about themselves regardless of performance.” So they abolish grades, distinctions, and standards, all in the name of maintaining the students’ self-esteem. In other words, we want the students to think they are something when they are nothing. The charade may continue (possibly) until graduation, when the hapless graduate discovers that stupidity doesn’t work, and that he can’t either. The unkind world will only let him manage the kind of cash register manufactured by Fischer-Price. 

Education isn’t about feeling good now, but growing so you feel good for the right reasons later. As in the gym so in the world: you’ll never get stronger without sweaty and painful work.

Read the whole piece here.