Learning is primarily a matter of personal discipline; students cannot be motivated by school or college alone.

Introducing the top students in each class, and giving awards to the successful students in front of the others, schools encourage the students to imitate the successful ones. In college or university, analogously, top students are granted some facilities such as scholarship, tuition fee waiver, and so on. But none of them effectively influence a student who does not want to learn. Learning requires hardworking, perseverance, and determination. None of these factors could be achieved only by extrinsic encouragement unless the students begin to want to learn. Based on this fact, I agree with the author of the statement above who believes that an academic institution alone cannot motivate the students to learn.

To begin with, only by a self-disciplined approach are the students able to accomplish learning. Learning demands an intrinsic discipline to tolerate the hardship of studying complex and extensive materials. Sometimes, the materials required to study, become boring. The workload seems heavy for the students, and the contents do not absorb them. It is here that a disciplined person fulfills the task of learning despite a possible lack of interest toward that task.

Simultaneously, there are many temptations and distractions in the students’ milieu that every student needs to overcome them, and this calls for a personal discipline. Such distracting factors include hormonal changes during puberty, family problems, and so on. Tempting factors such as video games, peer pressure, and myriads of other factors also have negative impacts on the fulfillment of a course of study. Here, a successful student by learning how to control one’s emotions, can concentrate on the task of studying and not to give way to the temptations. This is why between concentration in studying and the success of the students is a firm linkage.

However, School and college come into play by indirectly help the students to learn how to discipline themselves. Although learning is a personal matter, the academic institutions instill such a discipline by providing situations in which the students assume a self-discipline. To illustrate, let me recall that after the exams how repeatedly we promised ourselves that in the following term “I will not postpone my study to the night before the exam”. This is when we are adapting a personal discipline by the obligations of the school. Therefore, self-discipline needs to be learned per se, and schools, especially primary schools, confer it on the students by challenging them with exams.

In short, it is only the self-discipline of the students that results in a successful learning. The encouragement of the academia is effective when they are emanate in the self-discipline of the students, otherwise they become null. Therefore, it holds true to claim that learning is a personal discipline and academic institutions cannot solely be effective in extolling pupils to learn.