Part 2 of a Series of Articles about the Brave New World of Gaming in the Classroom
The dangers of indoctrination become clearer
when one considers the fact that the games being supported by the Department of
Education focus on “social change.” Most of the presentations at the four-day
Games for Change event involved lessons about tolerance of the Muslim “other,”
global warming, sustainability, bullying, Native American culture, nuclear
disarmament, and sexuality.
As recounted in my
previous
article, gaming, or the use of video games for classroom instruction, aligns
with the goals of the current Department of Education and the Common Core
initiative. Gaming helps to overcome the “achievement gap” by enabling students
to proceed at their own pace. Poor readers have less need to improve their
reading skills as they are given access to curricular materials through images
and sound.
Abstract thought
is replaced by presumed “real-world problems,” and proponents tout gaming as a
way to give students experience in solving such problems. Realistically, the
problems are pretend problems, and students give pretend solutions. There can
hardly be an objective evaluation for a fourth-grader’s proposal for solving
world hunger or global warming (the stuff of lessons these days). Instead of
measuring a student’s knowledge of the subject matter, points are given for
such things as “creativity” and “critical thinking.” Such subjective criteria
give teachers greater leeway in evaluating students and closing the achievement
gap.
But through
constant auditory and visual stimulation, gaming stymies independent thought.
The constant noise and moving images make it impossible to reflect in the way
one can with books. Thus, gaming allows even greater opportunities for
indoctrination.
The dangers of
indoctrination become clearer when one considers the fact that the games being
supported by the Department focus on “social change.”
Such common sense
observations are supported by the facts: the research does not show that gaming
has a positive effect on learning. The lack of credible research, of course,
has had no bearing on the Department of Education’s push for the increased use
of “digital
learning.” For years now the Department has been doling out grants to game
developers to teach everything from math and science, to social and emotional
intelligence, to ethics, and history.
This year it took
the step of co-sponsoring the “Games for Change” festival in New York. This
first-day session, attended by Department of Education representatives, was called
“Games for Learning.” The theme of gaming in the classroom continued, though,
into the following days, when government employees continued to participate. At
the event, developers were invited to apply for grants from non-profit arms of
technology companies and associations, as well as from the U.S. government.
The Department of
Education also used its resources to promote the event. An announcement was
made by Chad Sansing, who “teaches technology and project-based learning at the
BETA Academy in Staunton, Virginia,” and Antero Garcia, a “Teaching Ambassador
Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education” and Assistant Professor at Colorado
State University, at medium.com,
where Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had promoted the event himself.
Sansing and Garcia announced that The U.S. Department of Education and Games
for Change, “with support from the Entertainment Software Association,” would
be hosting “the Games for Learning Summit April 21 at the 2015 Games for Change
(G4C) Festival.” Expected participants (over 250) included “nationally
recognized educators, the designers of some of today’s most popular video
games, and members of the U.S. Department of Education.”
Sansing and Garcia
recalled participating in the White House “Game Jam” with teams of game
designers and some “amazing teachers” at the beginning of the school year.
Sansing’s game-design project, they claimed, demonstrated the benefits of
game-based learning: “media literacy, soft skills like collaboration, and
technical skills like managing an online repository of A/V assets, to say
nothing of the logic, math, reading, and writing skills . . . in navigating
tutorials, communicating online, and building . . . games.” They added
excitedly, “Students even discussed gender norms in character design and
traditional gaming narratives.” They listed the same benefits of gaming as
commonly ascribed to Common Core: “critical thinking, persistence, and
problem-solving to master, critique, play, and make.”
Who participated
in the event? What kinds of skills were promoted? Industry spokespeople,
government officials, and game designers came together to discuss “partnering”
with each other as they uncritically promoted the benefits of gaming. The
partnering is much like the “partnering” that has been revealed in the production
of Common Core curricula and assessment, the crony alliance between the
U.S. Department of Education, technology companies, and their non-profit arms
(that serve to advance sales of the for-profit companies).
In spite of
Sansing and Garcia’s claim that games would teach “logic, math, reading, and
writing skills” most of the presentations at the four-day event involved
lessons about tolerance of the Muslim “other,” global warming, sustainability,
bullying, Native American culture, nuclear disarmament, and sexuality.
The cronyism and disturbing
indoctrination lessons will be discussed in following installments.
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., has
taught college English for over twenty years. She is the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project,
Inc., an education reform initiative that offers information and
resources for students, parents, and citizens. The motto, “Resisting the
Re-Education of America,” arose in part from her perspective as a very young
immigrant from the former Communist Yugoslavia (Slovenia specifically). She
writes extensively and is the editor of EXILED. Ms. Grabar is also a contributor to SFPPR
News & Analysis.
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