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Turning Education into a Virtual Game: Is do it yourself learning just around the corner?

Domenick J. Maglio, Ph.D. Neo Traditionalist

Modern public schools have become a Walmart-type one-stop big-box store depository for children. In the pursuit meeting the unfulfilled needs of children from dysfunctional families, modern schools have unintentionally given many intact families the opportunity to unload their responsibilities on the government. Students from preschool to high school receive food, healthcare, therapy, after school recreation, career specialization, sex training, mini society exposure, alcohol, drug and gambling counseling under the guise of education. Our public schools have taken on most of the functions of the traditional family.

Presently educational elites are not only interested in social engineering of our present society. They have embarked on leading us into the radical virtual world of the future. These are people of a similar ilk who predicted in the 1960s that automation in the workplace would make manual work obsolete. They predicted the “dotcoms” would become the future Fortune 500 companies. For more than a decade they pushed the laptop computers as a panacea to correct problems in the classroom and are now gung ho to revamp government education to meet the projected needs in a futuristic virtual world.

Unfortunately, the use of laptops has not shown the predicted positive results. “Last month (April 2007) the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used academic software programs for math and reading and those who did not.” Winnie Hu, “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops:, New York Times, May 4, 2007. The difficulty of preventing the abuse of the laptop in the classroom is well documented.

Here we go again with another “group think” fad. American government schools have a long history of going off the deep end on tangents that result in discontinuity and confusion for students and continual training and retraining for staff. In fact these think tank opinion shapers are dissatisfied with changing the present society piecemeal. Their intent is to create learning which would maximize technological innovations to motivate the brightest and most creative students rather than transmitting fundamental knowledge, skills and character development to the majority.

Another marketing benefit of this technological approach, besides being attractive to the future Bill Gateses, is that it would accommodate a significant segment of the upper and middle class gaming addicts and their parents. By using mobile digital devices like PDAs, cell phones, Ipods, and mashups the gamer can be drawn back into purposeful learning. Digital play and networking through video games, video and photo logs and podcasting, would create a personal learning school without walls, accessible anywhere or anytime.

In this virtual-gaming education world, teachers would become “context experts”, “learning coaches”, “network navigators,” or “internet managers.” The traditional role of a teacher would be simplified to being merely an internet guide.

This would make many uncommitted parents and teachers ecstatic as it places the responsibility for learning squarely on the shoulders of the youngster relieving the adults of another series of obligations to the child. This sink or swim technological environment would be a treasure for the self-initiating, academically sound student although it does little to motivate students who are disengaged in developing the character, organization and study skills necessary to take control of their addicted, non productive lives.

Throughout history from the Golden Age of Greece to Modern America the goal of education has been to elevate students to function successfully in society. Academic skills and moral values were taught and reinforced in school to insure the child had the tools to conform to the expectations of society. The basic core understanding of how to perform in the present culture gives students the ability to adapt to anything they have to face in the future.

Even to conceptualize a world where students will be DIY (do it yourself) learning through the format of technological gaming is folly. It might be an easy way to appease students in general, especially the segment of dysfunctional students who are addicted to video gaming, but it will not prepare children to compete with other students worldwide. Other than the family, the institution of education has the most potential to inculcate moral values and skills that preserve society.

Children do not need to be prepared to exist in some hypothetical cockamamie world that will never come to be. They need to learn how to read, write, calculate, express themselves, work, critically think and be good human beings who follow the Golden Rule. It is improbable students will learn all of this on digital devices with minimal guidance from parents and teachers.