Motivation is the most important factor in learning and education.

It's not the only Factor that's important but the other ones will tend to come if everybody is interested and feeling positive about what's going on. If you have a teacher that's passionate about a subject and passionate about teaching it, and you have students that can be swept up in that passion, they will learn.

Is a big part of why so many pilot education programs succeed and then fail when they're scaled up. The teachers in the original program are enthusiastic about what their participating in, maybe even it's their own ideas or they were drawn to ideas they found compelling. This makes them better teachers.

If we want to scale up a successful educational program, what we need first of all is first class human beings with some ability to teach. Then we need to give them the freedom and logistical support to concentrate on carrying kids through their passions rather than just some standardized curriculum. There was much more room for this during the late 19th century and then later on during 1950s and 1960s and that's part of the reason why we suddenly had so many excellent engineers and scientists.

Give a good salary to the teachers, give them good classroom budgets for equipment and experiments and enrichment. Fire most administrators and keep administrators as servants to the teachers to carry out logistical tasks and to handle things like unruly students and tedious tasks rather than have them be the teacher's bosses. Within certain limits allow the teachers to pick the topics they're most interested in individually and they think they can teach the best rather than a standardized curriculum. Make sure they have the best textbooks, test Banks, and teaching materials.

Then you will get excellent education.