Economy & Vision › Cultural & Social Dimensions of Economy · 14 min read
A child crouches by a stream.
It throws a stick into the water and runs after it. The stick gets caught between two stones. The child dams the water, adds more sticks, observes the current, and tears everything apart again.
No one told it that class is now in session.
And yet, it is learning.
It is learning about water, weight, movement, resistance, balance, and materials. It is learning that an idea can fail and yet live on in the next attempt. It learns with its whole body, with wet hands, cold feet, and wide-awake eyes.
Above all, it learns because it wants to know what happens.
That is the crucial difference.
Because learning does not begin with a curriculum.
Learning begins with a movement within a person.
With wonder.
With curiosity.
With a question that was not posed from the outside.
With enthusiasm.
In our society, we often treat enthusiasm as a pleasant bonus.
First comes duty.
Then comes the material.
Then comes practice, testing, and evaluation.
And if there is any joy left at the end, learning might even be fun.
But what if this order is fundamentally wrong?
What if enthusiasm is not the reward after learning?
What if enthusiasm is what first creates the soil in which deep learning can grow?
André Stern sums up this perspective in his lecture on enthusiasm, learning, and development with a simple thought:
Our brain develops where we use it with enthusiasm.
This calls many things into question.
Of course, people can also absorb information under pressure. We can memorize dates, pass exams, repeat work processes, and follow instructions.
But what remains of it?
How much of what we have learned over the years is still truly alive within us today?
How much of it can we not only reproduce but also apply, modify, connect, and further develop on our own?
We have become accustomed to equating short-term recall with education.
Yet a passed test initially only proves that a person could give an expected answer at a specific time.
It does not prove that information has become insight.
Stern describes enthusiasm as fertilizer for the brain.
He does not explicitly mention dopamine but rather speaks more generally of neuroplastic messengers. According to his description, these support the processes through which connections in the brain can change, strengthen, and form anew.
The image of fertilizer fits surprisingly well.
A seed can lie in the ground for years.
Its possibilities are present. But it does not grow just because someone demands growth from it.
It needs moisture.
Warmth.
Light.
Living soil.
The human brain does not develop simply because we pour as much information into it as possible. What matters is whether something becomes alive within a person.
According to Stern, a two- or three-year-old child experiences a veritable storm of enthusiasm every two or three minutes.
This initially sounds unbelievable.
But anyone who has ever attentively accompanied a small child through a garden, a forest, or a workshop knows this movement.
A snail leaves a shiny trail across a stone.
A leaf turns in the wind.
An entire world lives under a piece of wood.
A bird calls from a tree.
Dough rises over the edge of a bowl.
A tiny seed has become a plant.
A large machine starts moving.
Again and again, something happens that completely captivates a child.
Stern says:
The brain of a small child is practically wading in fertilizer.
Then comes his alarming comparison:
Many adults experience similarly strong enthusiasm only two or three times a year.
Whether these frequencies can be precisely measured is not the decisive point. No scientific evidence is cited for this in the lecture.
But the observation hits something real:
Children encounter the world as if it were full of wonders. Many adults move through the same world as if everything were already known.
Perhaps we have not stopped learning because our brains have become too old.
Perhaps we have stopped learning because we are too rarely truly captivated by something.
Children do not distinguish between play and learning.
This separation comes from adults.
A child does not first build a hut and then turn to the "real" learning.
It learns while building.
It searches for branches, compares lengths, tests loads, adjusts angles, and discovers which construction holds. It negotiates with other children, develops rules, distributes tasks, and responds to unexpected difficulties.
In doing so, movement, perception, imagination, language, relationships, and thinking are not separated.
Everything happens simultaneously.
The child does not repeat an action because ten repetitions are prescribed on a worksheet. It repeats it because it wants to find something out.
It fails and starts again.
Not because someone has prescribed perseverance.
But because its question has not yet been answered.
Play is not a break from learning.
Play is the original form of learning.
Play has no externally predetermined outcome. Precisely for this reason, it is serious.
A child can fully devote itself to something. It can seek out its own boundaries without those boundaries having been defined beforehand by adults.
When adults continually interrupt, evaluate, and transform this play into a predetermined learning goal, its character changes.
An independent movement becomes an external task.
Curiosity becomes expectation.
Discovery becomes performance.
Enthusiasm becomes duty.
Stern describes the absurdity of our education system with a bitter exaggeration:
A good student forgets the material three weeks after the exam. A poor student forgets it three days before the exam.
The difference then does not lie in whether the knowledge has truly become part of the person.
The difference lies only in the timing of forgetting.
We invest a tremendous portion of our lifetime in content that does not touch us and therefore barely takes root.
This is not just a pedagogical problem.
It is an enormous waste of human life energy.
People spend years fulfilling the expectations of institutions. They learn to provide answers that others already know. At the same time, there is often little room for those questions that actually arise from within themselves.
What is learned with enthusiasm has a different quality.
We remember the name of a bird because we encountered it one morning.
We understand soil because we have held it in our hands, smelled it, and observed it over the years.
We do not grasp fire through a definition but because we have learned to kindle, nurture, and tend it.
We understand bread differently when we have seen the grain, touched the ear, ground the flour, and kneaded the dough.
Knowledge becomes lasting when it connects with experience.
It remains because it has acquired meaning for us.
You can require people to show up.
You can assign tasks.
You can set learning goals, control results, and punish deviations.
But you cannot command:
Be enthusiastic now.
Stern tells of his guitar maker. At the beginning of his training, the master said to him:
I can show you everything. I cannot teach you anything.
This contains a deep understanding of learning.
A person can open up their knowledge.
They can demonstrate, explain, and accompany.
They can provide good tools.
They can create a space where questions are welcome.
But they cannot take over the actual learning process for another person.
No one can learn into another person from the outside.
The spark must jump.
This idea comes to life in a story about Stern’s young son Antonin.
Antonin gets a toy combine harvester and wants to know what this machine does. He watches videos and plays combine harvester all winter.
In the summer, he discovers such a machine in a field.
The family stops.
The combine harvester comes closer until the driver stops the machine in front of the child. He opens the door and invites Antonin and his father into the cab.
They stay there for two hours.
Not because a two-hour lesson was planned.
But because the child is nearly bursting with enthusiasm.
He wants to know everything.
And the driver wants to show him everything.
The man is also touched. For days, he has been driving across the fields without really being noticed. Now there is a child who not only sees his machine but also admires his work.
He takes wheat grains from the tank, places them in Antonin’s hands, and says:
This is future bread.
In this moment, no abstract subject is being taught.
The child experiences a complete context:
Earth.
Seed.
Growth.
Machine.
Work.
Harvest.
Flour.
Bread.
And in the middle, two people whose enthusiasm reinforces each other.
The driver becomes a teacher without having introduced himself as one.
The child learns without having attended a lesson.
From an encounter, a relationship arises. From a relationship, knowledge arises. And from knowledge, a new connection to the world.
A child does not only need people who explain something about the world.
It needs the world.
It needs gardens, kitchens, streams, and forests.
It needs workshops, farms, construction sites, and bakeries.
It needs animals, plants, tools, and materials.
It needs people who are really doing something and sharing their experience.
For a child, a garbage collector can become a role model just as much as a doctor.
A gardener can show it something that no textbook can convey.
An old craftsman can pass on knowledge in a few movements that has grown in his hands over decades.
Children do not initially know the social hierarchies between these activities.
They do not ask:
They ask:
This is a very original form of openness.
It does not perceive the world as a collection of separate subjects. It sees relationships.
The rain belongs to the soil.
The soil belongs to the plant.
The plant belongs to the animal.
The animal belongs to the landscape.
The landscape belongs to nutrition.
Nutrition belongs to the community.
The child does not first have to artificially connect these contexts.
It experiences them as a whole.
The fundamental alternative is not simply school or no school.
It is:
Trust or fear.
Fear first sees the deficit:
Trust sees the movement:
Trust does not mean leaving a child to its own devices.
It means being truly present without wanting to control every step.
It means not viewing a child as unfinished raw material that must first become a complete human being through education.
The child is already there.
With its perception.
Its dignity.
Its curiosity.
Its ability to form relationships.
Its urge to understand the world.
At this point, an even bigger question opens up.
How fixed is a human brain at all?
The so-called Nun Study accompanied 678 Catholic nuns over many years. The participants regularly underwent cognitive examinations and, after their deaths, donated their brains for research.
Something remarkable emerged:
In some nuns, researchers found clear Alzheimer’s-typical changes in the brain after death, although these women had not shown correspondingly pronounced dementia symptoms during their lifetimes.
This finding is often simplified as an identical "hole pattern" in a CT scan. This is not accurate.
After death, among other things, amyloid deposits, neurofibrillary changes, brain infarcts, and other neuropathological features were examined.
The actual finding is astonishing even without exaggeration:
Visible pathological changes and the actually lived cognitive abilities did not always directly correspond.
Today, this is discussed, among other things, in terms of cognitive reserve and resilience to neuropathological changes.
This does not mean that enthusiasm prevents Alzheimer’s.
The study also does not prove that play, education, or an active life can compensate for dementia.
But it shows that a person cannot be reduced to a single image of their brain.
Our life story, our relationships, our linguistic and cognitive abilities, our activities, and many other factors can influence how resilient we become to changes.
The brain is not a machine in which a damaged part always has exactly the same visible consequence.
It is alive.
It changes with the life we lead.
Every form of economy is based on an image of humanity.
If we assume that people are naturally lazy and unmotivated, we build systems of control.
Then we need:
If, on the other hand, we understand people as curious, capable of relationships, and willing to shape things, a different question arises:
Not:
How do we get people to perform?
But:
Under what conditions do people want to learn, contribute, and take responsibility on their own?
Work can dull people.
But it can also create skill, belonging, and self-efficacy.
The difference lies not only in the activity.
It lies in whether a person recognizes a connection.
Whether their experience counts.
Whether they are allowed to shape things.
Whether their work is noticed by others.
Whether it remains connected to real life.
The combine harvester driver initially did his work. But in the encounter with the child, a routine activity became something visible and meaningful again.
He did not just show a machine.
He showed future bread.
Raw materials are limited.
Time is limited.
Money is limited.
Enthusiasm behaves differently.
Stern describes it as a resource that does not diminish through use.
It can jump.
The enthusiasm of a child awakens the enthusiasm of an adult.
The enthusiasm of a gardener opens other people’s eyes to plants.
The enthusiasm of a baker can create a connection to grain, craftsmanship, and nutrition.
The enthusiasm of a person for wood, music, animals, stars, mushrooms, soils, or machines can touch something in others that may have long been dormant.
Enthusiasm cannot be stored.
It cannot be forced.
But it can be shared.
And the more people come into contact with what they are truly passionate about, the more knowledge, skill, and creative power emerge.
When people learn through enthusiasm, play, relationships, and direct experience, we must not limit learning to schools, seminars, or digital courses.
A farm is a learning space.
A kitchen is a learning space.
A workshop is a learning space.
A garden is a learning space.
A distribution warehouse is a learning space.
A forest is a learning space.
Software development is a learning space.
An encounter between people with different experiences is a learning space.
Wherever people really do something, observe, try things out, and share with each other, learning can happen.
This does not always require a fixed learning goal.
It requires people who can do something and are willing to show it.
It requires access to real activities, tools, and contexts.
And it requires the freedom to follow one’s own question long enough.
The crucial question is therefore not only:
What must people learn so that our existing systems continue to function?
We can also ask:
How do we shape our society, our education, and our working world so that people can become enthusiastic again, learn independently, and bring their abilities into the world?
Perhaps this is one of the most important cultural tasks of our time:
Not to press more and more knowledge into people.
But to create a living soil again.
A soil in which curiosity takes root.
In which experience is allowed to grow.
In which people show each other something.
And in which enthusiasm generates the power through which we continually rediscover ourselves and our world.
The basis of this article is the transcript of the lecture or podcast "How Enthusiasm Promotes Learning and Development" by André Stern.
The frequencies of child and adult enthusiasm mentioned therein are not linked to a verifiable scientific source in the transcript. They are therefore presented here as statements by André Stern and as illustrative exaggerations, not as conclusively proven measurements.
In the transcript, André Stern speaks of "neuroplastic messengers." He does not explicitly identify these as dopamine.
On the Nun Study:
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By Felix Schröder, with support from AI (ChatGPT)
Created on September 21, 2026 · Last updated on October 11, 2026
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