Your Child Doesn't Hate Learning. They Hate Being Tested.
In the early 1970s, researchers at Stanford ran an experiment with nursery-school children who already liked drawing. One group was told they would receive a certificate for drawing. Another group drew with no promise of reward. Two weeks later, the children who had been rewarded drew noticeably less than the ones who had not.
Nothing had been taken away from them. They had simply been taught that drawing was the sort of thing one does in order to get something, and once the something stopped, so did the drawing. Psychologists call it the overjustification effect.
Most parents have watched a version of this at home without having a name for it.
The evidence is already in your house
The child who cannot be moved to open a Science textbook will spend four uninterrupted hours learning to edit video, or memorising the entire hierarchy of a game's crafting system, or working out why a football team keeps conceding in the last ten minutes. That is sustained, self-directed, genuinely difficult learning. Nobody assigned it and nobody is marking it.
So the capacity is intact. What has gone wrong is narrower than it looks.
What is actually missing
Usually not discipline. Usually context. A fact taught toward a test is a fact with no home - it arrives, gets stored somewhere shallow, and leaves after the exam. The same fact taught toward a question the child already cares about behaves completely differently. It attaches to something.
Our founder noticed this while tutoring neighbours' children between civil services attempts, and it became the observation the whole organisation was built on: nobody hated learning. They hated being taught toward a test they did not care about passing, in a way that gave them no reason to be curious.
Four things that help
Ask what they are into, then take it seriously enough to ask a second question. The second question is where it stops being small talk.
Connect the syllabus to something live. Chemical reactions become interesting next to a news story about battery supply chains. This is what a correlative curriculum means in practice.
Stop rewarding the outcome so heavily. Praise for a mark teaches that the mark was the point. Interest in the reasoning teaches that the reasoning was.
Let them produce something unassessed. A blog, a video, a paper nobody grades. The absence of a grade is the active ingredient, not a compromise.
This is not an argument against exams
Exams are a reasonable way to check whether something was learned, and in India they are not optional. The mistake is treating the exam as the reason to learn rather than a measurement of it. A child who understands the material because it interested them tends to do perfectly well in the exam. The reverse is much less reliable.
The capacity to keep learning once nobody is grading you is the thing worth protecting. We call it learnacy, and your child almost certainly still has it. It is just not being spent on the syllabus.
The Learnacy mentorship program runs 25 weekly sessions across a year on exactly this. Shorter options and dates are on Upcoming Programs.