These are very different things. When a kid says he hates learning, what he usually means is that he hates sitting in a classroom memorizing state capitals he'll never use. That's not learning he hates—that's a bad trade. He's being asked to spend a scarce resource (attention, effort, time) on something whose value he can't see.
The test for this is simple: does the same kid who "hates learning" go home and spend three hours figuring out how to beat a hard level in a video game? Of course he does. That's learning too—just learning where the effort-to-reward ratio makes sense to him.
The confusion here runs deep. We've defined "learning" too narrowly. We act as if learning only happens when someone sits down with a textbook. But learning is just updating your model of the world. It happens whenever you get better at anything—cooking, basketball, guitar, chess. The kid who practices skateboard tricks for hours is learning as intensely as any student. He just doesn't call it that.
So when someone says they hate learning, what they're actually reporting is a feeling about a specific context where learning was demanded of them under bad conditions. They're not reporting anything about their fundamental nature.
What makes learning feel like work is the gap between effort and perceived value. The formula is roughly:
Willingness to learn = perceived value / required effort
You want that ratio high. There are two ways to make it high: increase the value, or decrease the effort. Most educational systems focus obsessively on the value side—try to convince students that algebra will matter someday, that history is relevant—while doing almost nothing about the effort side.
This is backwards. Convincing someone that something will be valuable is hard, especially when you're asking them to trust a future self they can't imagine. Reducing the friction of learning is much more tractable.
Games are the canonical example. A good game is essentially a learning machine disguised as entertainment. The player is constantly forming hypotheses, testing them, updating her model. The reason it doesn't feel like work is that the feedback loop is tight and the rewards are immediate. You try something, you see what happens, you adjust. The effort feels justified because the payoff is right there.
The interesting thing about games is that people pay to do them. That should tell you something. When learning is structured well enough, it doesn't feel like effort at all—it feels like play. And people don't need to be coerced into play. They seek it out.
The real question for anyone trying to teach something is: how do I close the gap? How do I make the effort feel small relative to the reward?
A few things actually work:
Immediate feedback. The further the reward is from the action, the more effortful the action feels. This is why video games are so engaging and why studying for a test you'll take in six weeks is so miserable. If you can restructure learning so that people see the results of their actions quickly, the work feels lighter.