Waiting around
When I am speaking in public about how we need to rethink our education system to compete in the global marketplace, I am often asked: “Well, what are our competitors doing?”
Funny premise there: As long as no one else is teaching kids to think in innovative and creative ways, we don’t need to either. As if the world were simply standing still, happy to leave comparative advantages–and comparative disadvantages–right where they are.
Well, not surprisingly, things don’t quite happen that way.
A Nation Still at Risk?
It seems like the quality of education in our country has been under a perpetual orange alert.
Last month, an Op-Ed contributor to the New York Times, Edward B. Fiske, wrote an editorial entitled A Nation at a Loss for the 25th anniversary of ‘A Nation at Risk,’ a National report that described an educational crisis in our country with language so dire that both our national security and our global economic competitiveness seemed imminently threatened. While the document’s legacy, Fiske argues, is that the quality of our education system has remained on the national political agenda ever since, it’s not clear how much good it has done us.
A short list of the various movements that have been reactions to our educational crisis: ‘standards-based reform, the 1989 ‘education summit’ that set six ‘national goals’ for education, the push for school choice and, most recently, the No Child Left Behind legislation.’ These projects have not exactly been slam dunk successes.
Based on the work we do in the epistemic games group, I have some ideas why. But before going on to describe some of its failings, I’d like to give our education system its due.
When obsession is a good thing
Having raced through the Harry Potter books at lightning speed, in the last few months my older daughter has been reading and rereading–and rereading and rereading and rereading and rereading–the Warriors books by Erin Hunter. She reads all the time it seems. When she gets home from school. After dinner. Before bed. On weekend mornings. When relatives come over and she is bored. Really any free time she has.
She gets so absorbed that she doesn’t hear what is going on around her. We have to ask her things twice and three times. We have to insist that she stop reading to come to eat, or get ready to leave the house for an errand. She makes drawings of the characters from the books, and invents new characters and story lines. She makes models of where the clans live.
Now we’re happy that she likes reading, of course. It is great that she is passionate about it and gets so caught up in it. Reading is a good thing. But she doesn’t spend as much time as she used to doing arts and crafts projects. Sometimes she chooses to read rather than play with a friend. She spends less time playing make believe with her sister, or building with blocks and lego. So there is a tradeoff.
And I can’t help but think that if she were playing a video game (or games) in the same way, she would get a different reaction from the adults around her. The word “addiction” would be thrown around. There would be a discussion, perhaps, about time limits or rules about when she could play and under what conditions.
The hidden world of adults (Gary Gygax R.I.P)
Let me begin by pouring out a little mead in honor of Gary Gygax, inventor of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, who passed away on March 4th, 2008.
I have told anyone who will listen that D&D changed my life. I discovered it at age 11. Along with my interest in science fiction and fantasy novels, it introduced me to exciting new worlds. All kinds of worlds, populated by elves and dwarves and gods and monsters.
But the most important world that Dungeons and Dragons introduced me to was the world of adults.
When people get in the way
Bagley, E.S., & Shaffer, D.W. (2009). When people get in the way: Promoting civic thinking through epistemic game play. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations. 1(1), 36-52.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/ijgcms-bagley-shaffer.pdf
