Mildly interesting article, though sadly at no point it actually expands on the title. There's nothing about how or why "students learn from the people they love".
Slightly related: students learn a lot because of having a crush on someone. I've learned a bunch of things this way too. It's not something that can be structurally exploited, though.
>It's not something that can be structurally exploited, though. //
If you're motivated to learn in order to impress a potential mate, rev that seems like something that might rely reduce - in part - to seeing sexual stimulation? That element might be exploitable, there may even be a way to do that morally?
Having a typo cheat sheet now: to some extent, maybe, though I didn't mean (just) the learning that's, in student's mind, explicitly motivated by desire to sleep with someone. I meant primarily the kind of implicit change that I've both observed and experienced to happen when one starts having romantic feelings - suddenly everything that's related to the other person gets much more interesting, including school subjects one believes the other person seems to like.
As for exploiting this, or a bunch of other "nonstandard" sources of motivation, I worry in practice about what I personally call "educational games problem" - both teens and adults quickly notice when all you're doing is sprinkle some artificial "fun" on top of the same old drudgery. They're not tricked by it. It's the education part, not motivation part, that has to be secondary and sneaked in, for the whole thing to work. That's why you can get 12-yo to study undergrad-level physics as a side effect of Kerbal Space Program - they naturally learn to get better at the activity they find intrinsically rewarding.
Slightly related: students learn a lot because of having a crush on someone. I've learned a bunch of things this way too. It's not something that can be structurally exploited, though.