I disagree with your comment about better teachers. Teachers are simply a conduit for learning. They don't scale, which is why there is still a power-law distribution in educational outcomes despite tons or research and data and training and testing that should combat that. Basically rich people get richer because all rich people who are generationally consistently rich have one thing in common. They are autodidacts. If you can learn on your own, and have the capacity to recognize when the assumptions underpinning the status-quo are no longer correct, you can consistently remain wealthy relative to everyone else. True rich families understand this and teach it implicitly/explicitly to their children. Who end up being the fertile ground on which 'good teachers' have a multiplicative effect. This does not work for the poor as they lack the necessary base skills and knowledge to benefit from good teaching. Poor people still break through because circumstance often teaches people, like everyone who came from nothing on this message board, how to learn on their own without help or assistance from others. Advocating more assistance from others is not the solution. And for the same reason that sending $1T in aid to Africa has had mixed results.
Your comments about rich families ignore completely the effect of status in life. Knowledge alone does not generate wealth. That needs work directed in the right direction which is also a lot easier if you have the society connections and the capital to pull off your ideas. The rich get richer because they can invest and buy successful businesses. Sending your kids to Eton to rub shoulders with royalty has far more to do with status than education.
While I agree with you, your point is ultimately a semantic difference and not related to the parent discussion on how to fix education. Certainly 'status' defined this way is a necessity of being rich but not sufficient. Being an autodidact is both necessary and sufficient for long-term multi-generational success. eg. 2 generations can live off the fruits of one, but then you're out. whereas if you teach your kids how to learn on their own, you can sustain quite easily for many.
That's what I hate about school. It doesn't teach or encourage autodidactism. Instead, it rewards those who do what they're told and follow the status quo. You see it a lot in straight A students where they're basically just really good at jumping through hoops given to them and have no creativity. Being able to answer problem sets from a textbook is great, but independent and original thought often requires you to step outside the box and question things.
While the overwhelming majority of my professional respect goes to those who are builders at their core, I think you're using 'toast' in a way that demonstrably includes six figure salaries. The only X-factor is how many (N < 5) years it takes to get there, without any real initiative or personal projects.
I disagree. I'm an autodidact, but I'm not rich. As a kid I did things like repeatedly read every volume of the encyclopaedia cover-to-cover. On a tour group a few years ago I was nicknamed "google [vacri]" because I knew a bit about everything and people started asking all sorts of esoteric stuff. But I didn't earn average wage until my late 30s (median wage early 30s) and didn't earn above average wage until this year (42). There's lots of people out there like me, who love learning about all sorts of things, but don't learn about the specific things to make one wealthy.
What makes rich families generationally rich is not autodidactism, but skill transfer and network effects. For example, it's easier to handle money when you've been around people who know a lot about finance and money movements than it is to autodidact-learn about money.
And just to be clear. The answer for children is to make learning to love learning play. And the way to do that in a way that scales is through a video game. That is the future of education. Games for children that teach them how to learn, that they then use to set their own educational path. With teachers, schools, mentors, and advisors helping along the way.
I blame video games for making me into a history buff. And maybe Legos, combined with the History Channel before it was the RedneckAliensJesus Channel.
Civilization, Lords of the Realm, Caesar II, Robert E. Lee: Civil War General, Close Combat, Total War, Pirates!, Anno 1602, Europa Universalis/Crusader Kings/Victoria/Hearts of Iron, Age of Empires
Or to go way back, Math/Word Rescue, Treasure Mountain, Midnight Rescue, Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, the crazy game that was part of Encarta, Dr Brain, Maxis Sim games all taught me math, geography, history, logic, physics, etc.
Same story, nearly the same list. I'd throw in Shadow President, which taught me the names and locations of all the (cold war era) countries by third grade or so, and gave me a good sense of global and regional balances of power.
If you haven't played "Civil War Generals 2: Grant, Lee, Sherman" you should. It's Robert E. Lee: Civil War General but with the brokenness fixed—there's a victory point system that's in part based on locations held, which keeps you from just turtling on the nearest high ground and waiting for the enemy to come into cannon range—and a much larger campaign. It's kind of tricky to run these days, and is a bit unstable even under ideal conditions. Best solution may involve a Win98se VM. :-/
The Encarta game was awesome. I'd forgotten about it. Thanks for the memory.
CWG2 was fantastic. I scoured bargain bins high and low for a couple of years before I found a copy. Lord knows how many hours I lost refighting Gettysburg or marathon custom scenarios on the ridiculously big Manassas, Harper's Ferry and Cross Keys/Port Republic maps. It's too bad it wasn't more popular; I'd have loved to see a Napoleonic or Franco-Prussian expansion. I remember a couple of total conversion mods that sort of worked, but it was not a particularly mod-friendly game, unfortunately.
Too bad that the only real option to play it these days is still 800x600 on a Win98 VM. If GOG ever offers a version that works on modern operating systems, it will be a "Shut up and take my money" moment for me.
Someday, I want to build a medieval/ancient set game with the same general mechanics...
I love GOG, but that list is frustrating, when so many of the top items on that list are games that they will never get rights to.
Blizzard is never going to give away their back catalog (they'd sell it themselves). Neither is Valve. Nor, most likely, is EA, with their awful Origin service.
Then there are all of the newer games that you can find anywhere... Obviously, they've got to make money and focus on what pays the bills, but it makes me happier when I see abandonware and unavailable games get legitimate releases on there, compared to when its something already on Steam.
Nothing I can think of that isn't primarily intended as edutainment, e.g. Math Blaster, Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail. Oh man, and Number Munchers[1]! Those were good around that age. Not many games that were only incidentally very educational that I could handle at that age. I'd expect most of the ones on that list to become accessible to a kid in 1st grade now over the next 2-3 years, though.
I remember loving Microsoft Dinosaurs—a wikipedia search for it redirects to a list including that and a bunch of similar looking titles under the Microsoft Home label—and Explorers of the New World, which even the Internet apparently barely remembers judging from the google results. They'd be OK for a 1st grader but those weren't even games, really.
Main issue is they're all old. A few are hard to run. Some are only available on used CDs. Not sure how they'd keep a modern kid's attention. I gather there are some good games like this on tablets and such, but my kids aren't quite old enough for that stuff yet, so I can't recommend any.
Side note: I'm pretty sure playing Doom, Dark Forces, Wolf3D, and other FPS games with confusing maps from young age is ~20% responsible for my wicked-high scores on spatial reasoning tests (Building lego sets from the instructions can be credited with the other ~80%) so, there's that.
Really a beautiful game, especially to have bundled into an encyclopedia. I'm a little surprised there isn't a version built for Wikipedia... There's this (http://www.wikimaze.me/) but it's not quite the same
I believe the core issue is just about agency: kids will enjoy and learn from anything and everything if they don't feel forced to do so. The best way to absolutely ruin a book? Make it a required reading in school. The best way to make a totally crap game that is neither fun nor educating? Make an educational game.
If you want to kids to learn and have fun at the same time, you have to accept the model of "entertainment first, education incidental" as opposed to "education in game's clothes". But that's hard to do because people assume, probably based on their own experience in the crappy school system, that learning must be about hard work. Yes, learning involves a lot of work, but it's not hard if you find it fun.
I wonder if perhaps kids find the assigned work so dreadful because the manner of assignment assumes it will be. "Why should I read this?," asks the kid. "Because it is assigned," comes the answer. At which point, perhaps the child thinks, "Oh, you don't care about this, so why should I?," and the battle lines are drawn.
In other words, maybe the issue isn't whether or not something is assigned. Maybe the issue is whether or not the teacher cares about - and is excited about - the material. If the teacher thinks it is fun, maybe being assigned it is not such a heavy burden to bear.
"The best way to make a totally crap game that is neither fun nor educating? Make an educational game."
My 5 y. daughter is completely enthralled by a spelling and reading game on IPad. This leads me to disagree and claim instead that a crap game is not made good by educational goals but a good educational game is provably plausible - it just needs to be a good game.
It's about making a game that is educational, rather than an education tool that's a game. The vast majority of 'education games' are simple quizzes, barely even a game.
One of my favourite childhood games (Logical Journey of the Zoombinis) was all about maths, logic and problem solving, and I credit it for a lot of my early interest (and success) in those areas.
As a quick plug for something I loved - they recently kickstarted a remake http://www.zoombinis.com/ - I'd highly recommend it. (Not involved, besides backing the kickstarter).
> It's about making a game that is educational, rather than an education tool that's a game. The vast majority of 'education games' are simple quizzes, barely even a game.
Yes, exactly that.
My biggest problem with the education ecosystem is that adults try to bullshit kids instead of facilitating learning, and at the same time they forget children have perfect bullshit detectors - they haven't yet learned to question their intuition that something is pointless, or lie to themselves to get through drudgery.
Games are not made by just colorful graphics and telling a story. Kids can tell when you try to trick them into doing something they think is pointless, and it also erodes their trust quickly.
If you truly believe this, I would love to share what I'm working on with you: http://playlingoland.com
We are building a World of Warcraft-esque game for students learning languages, and we have people playing for 3-5 hours upon signing up (we had one student who signed up and played 10 hours within the first 24 hours of signing up). Students absolutely LOVE it.
I do believe the future of education is gaming. Unfortunately most of the world believes that it is gamifying things that aren't games inherently.
MMORPGs with levels, items, and avatars are games. Flashcards with points are not.
The second example is particularly fascinating. We can expect games to apply and reinforce studies in a technical field or to stimulate interest in history, but using a game to teach rhetoric and its ability to express and manipulate is something else.
My observation as a parent of two kids: I think that homework is already moving in that direction. An increasing amount of homework is done at the computer -- hours and hours of it.
Unfortunately, the stuff that's designed for education is Lame -- intellectually superficial, and boring for the kids -- and they know it. The companies that make that stuff are politically connected and mainly good at selling to school administrators.
It's been this way since the birth of the educational software industry.
Now I admit that I've never played video games, but I can't imagine creating an artificial learning environment that's as rich as going outside to play, making things, or writing code.
I disagree. My friends and I played video games for fun. We learned by having "cool" ideas and trying to solve them. This is how you get freshmen learning, nearly deriving, some very basic calculus and juniors doing basic ODEs, not to mention programming to solve things like building a website to allow users to submit and edit content, converse with each other, and search the content. TF-IDF isn't complicated, and almost naturally gets derived when you start to think about "what can I do to make this search better than LIKE '%term%'?"
Games can definitely help with strategical thinking, "people skills", and even learning, but to say they're the future is misguided. Supporting children who have interests is the way I think is best followed, and that can be incredibly resource intensive.
> And the way to do that in a way that scales is through a video game.
Well, that's one way. Any teacher who has used word-searches, acting, rhyming games, etc has found other ways. Don't get me wrong, there are a wealth of awesome startups in this space making apps, and I think they have a lot of potential, but they are certainly not the whole story, until we have something out of "The Diamond Age: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".
Lots of good actual science takes place in the real world, and a video game can certainly be part of the solution, but there's a lot of room for engineering and whatnot that can be part of an autodidactical solution that won't live in an app.
Exactly. Knowledge and insight is what you get when you take the facts you've been taught (or learned yourself) and internalize them. Schools nowadays focus too much on the first at the cost of the second, because former is easily testable and the latter takes time.
Interestingly enough, when the schools in my locale started talking about Common Core, I decided to look it up. I found that one or more states had published complete curriculum guides written around CC, and since I like math, I looked through the math curricula.
My impression is that the CC curriculum (neglecting variations that I haven't seen) is so ostentatiously mainstream, that I can't fathom how it became controversial, except that people mistakenly associate it with standardized testing.
Knowledge cannot be taught it must be learned.