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

Quoting Bum Phillips, “The only discipline that lasts is self-discipline. ” While I do concede that schools and colleges can be a catalyst in nurturing discipline in students, I mostly agree with the prompt that only students themselves can better inculcate personal discipline for two reasons. Firstly, educational institutions can give you all the resources that the student needs, but the students have to use it themselves to learn it. For example, the old fable about the thirsty donkey where the moral of the story states that one can get the donkey to the river but only the donkey can drink the water from the river themselves. No one can force feed the donkey, only he can drink whenever he wishes. Same goes for learning. Students can be motivated, pushed, exhorted by plenty of teachers but learning only comes with self discipline and determination. Even with the socio economic divide, whether you have the best of services or you come from a lower status family and cannot afford the best, if you wish to learn, you will make it happen yourself, whatever obstacles may come. Personal discipline cannot be taught in school. In other words, schools and colleges help students plant the seed of learning but the plant will only grow when the students water it themselves. Secondly, the history of mankind is a testimony that people have flourished even without the existence of an educational establishment. Most developing countries did not have schools and colleges to train and teach students. In countries like India and Africa, British rule was rife and so the socio-economic divide was disparate than ever. However, even in such uneducated populations, both India and Africa had successful and meritus leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. , both being highly educated. However, Indian society in those days weren’t so supportive of education. Yet, both these leaders emerge victoriously in their respective countries showing that schools and colleges are not needed but are just tools of shortcut. Therefore, only a person with their own willpower will learn better or learn at all. However, students growing in a positive environment tend to learn better. Recent studies have shown that students in an environment of encouragement grow better over an environment of hostility. The reason being their level of anxiety decreases due to the sense of experience of the environment and habit. For example, a student doing poorly in school due to their ADHD disorder might function better with a teacher provided by the school that is trying to tackle an assignment all by themselves. Here in this case, intervention of a caretaker or counsellor is clearly vital. However, stating that school and colleges alone are the sole motivation behind students' learning doesn’t hold water as students' success is equal to personal perseverance plus schools' additional push only boosting the students' learning progress. Thus, schools can motivate but cannot be the sole factor to a student's learning. In summary, despite the fact that schools shape a students lives students' lives, students themselves can only attribute their learning. The modern day debate of how important of a role do schools play in the learning of a student is a complex and remains to be argued about. If children are indeed the future of the world, then this is now not only a complicated discussion but a pressing one.