I look at things from a needs-based perspective and from the assumption that, barring conditioning to deny meeting needs or even their existence, living creatures innately seek to meet needs to survive and thrive.
Learning is a need to for both. The body needs to learn how to breathe, digest, poop, etc. Joy is a need for thriving. It also boosts learning.
There's an issue that arises here with common issues around "motivating kids to learn," which is this implies people need to be given some form of incentive to learn, when the truth is the brain is always learning. It may not be learning the content being taught, but it's at least definitely learning from the way the content's being taught. The issue here is that autonomy is a need and modern schooling seems to be focused on dictating to people what to learn. This is a systemic denial of autonomy. As a result, the learning environment is already suboptimal. And if someone already suffers from a chronic denial of autonomy (like, say, in a society that doesn't value empowering children to do what they want and/or in a family that also doesn't, or supports empowerment within a very limited set of constraints, all of which are common situations for most young people in the US), then the system is ensuring learning the curriculum will be severely hindered for those people.
People learn faster when they choose their options. Choosing from an arbitrarily constrained list of subjects isn't the same thing. And chronic need denial harms the learning process, so if you want people to learn what they need to survive and thrive, ask them what they want to learn next and help them learn about that thing and tie the exploration back to needs.
And if you don't know what the mathematically proven universal human needs are, welcome to the dystopia. We currently don't have such a list and I'm hoping category theorists or constructor theorists develop it soon. In the meantime, there are many different lists online promoting different needs. One that's seemingly been forgotten from many of them is the need for memory, so remember to figure out a process for uncovering hidden needs. I choose to follow suffering to see what the underlying needs are there and seeing if the suffering goes away after meeting those needs. If not, there may be a hidden need at play.