Learning is not a game

You can't game your way to a real education, writes Molly Worthen, a history professor, in a New York Times commentary. Giving every child a laptop and trying to make learning a fun game were huge mistakes, she argues.

Paige Drygas, who teaches high school English at a private school just north of Dallas, doesn't care if reading Emerson and Thoreau isn't fun for her students, writes Worthen. Instead of playing

“Walden,” a video game in which players simulate Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond, her students read the texts and discuss the idea of self-reliance. "She also requires her students to hand write their essays, read books in hard copy and use laptops as little as possible."

Technology was supposed to be make learning more efficient, especially for "digital natives" raised on screens, Worthen writes. Teachers were urged "to 'meet them where they are' by catering to shorter attention spans and swapping books for multimedia lessons."

"The concept of a digital native is a myth," she writes. "The advent of iPhones and laptops did not undo eons of brain evolution in the space of a few years."

“People are mistaking kids’ preference for deep biological reality,” says neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, author of The Digital Delusion.

“My daughter loves Popsicles. I have a choice: I could meet her where she’s at and start every meal with a Popsicle. But . . . Popsicles aren’t good for her, and she needs some vegetables.” -- Jared Cooney Horvath

As laptops and gamified lessons spread, reading and math scores fell -- in the U.S. and in other developed countries, Worthen writes. The Swedes, Danes and Norwegians are rolling back "digital learning."

"Comprehension collapses when students read texts on screens," she writes. "Their attention spans shrivel as well: A study of college students working on laptops during a lecture class found that they spent an average of 38 minutes of every hour off task."

Digital games can be effective tools — as long as they emphasize collaboration, creativity and risk-taking rather than lonely scrolling for the next dopamine hit," writes Worthen. But they should not be the center of learning.

Nothing seems able to kill the "zombie idea" that knowledge doesn't matter anymore, writes "Eduwonk" Andrew Rotherham, who's just back from an AI-centric edtech conference.

Education leaders love "substitutes for content and content-rich learning," he writes. The 21st Century Skills movement was . . . a push to devalue content knowledge," and now there's “durable skills.” “Portrait of a Graduate” could go the same way. The people who say students need "both" content knowledge and skills clearly "think content is less important and are unaware of the science about how people learn domain knowledge," Rotherham writes. "They don’t call them 'mere' facts because they think they’re important!"