I was reading a literature anthology and ran across a sentence saying that the book I was holding managed to do the impossible...find reading selections that are not only educational, but enjoyable as well.  Such a shame that years of cultural development yielded an implied polarity between these two terms.  One of the fundamental goals of any educator is to make the topic at hand enjoyable for students.  This should make them want to learn; and if someone actually wants to do something, they are much more likely to do it.  There are psychological ways to get a student to want to do something, but this doesn't always produce maximal enjoyment.  Is there any way to make the terms "educational" and "enjoyable" more compatible?

     Teachers need to avoid the prejudiced belief that a student's idea of enjoyable is typically detrimental to anything educational.  Before shuddering as another piano student wants to study a selection from the Harry Potter soundtrack, it's important to realize that this selection could be the motivation needed to tackle a new level of rhythmic and harmonic complexities.  (Please don't throw vegetables at me for this...) I recall getting a second grade student to learn to count a plethora of challenging syncopations and new notes because her desire to learn Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" could not be suppressed.  Too often, teachers feel progress will be hindered if they stray from their plan of attack instead of realizing that once the desire to learn is present in a student, education can happen at an exponentially faster rate.

     I find that working with items students find enjoyable accelerates learning in private piano lessons a great deal.  I'm sure it can be applied to instruction in nearly every discipline.  Instead of trying to figure out how to make "educational" items enjoyable, we owe it to our students to figure out how to make "enjoyable" items educational.