You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education< creigalt2 >
You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education
By Molly Worthen
Ms. Drygas is not only a fun-skeptic. She also requires her students to hand write their essays, read books in hard copy and use laptops as little as possible. These countercultural classroom policies all go together, because fun used to be a wonderful thing in school. Then screens came to dominate instruction time and software developers answered the call to make school fun and personalize learning with a growing marketplace of online games.
This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education: the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess. Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom — as a supplemental tool, rather than the source and summit of education....
Emily Cherkin, who works with families and schools as “the Screentime Consultant,” taught middle school English for 12 years before her frustration with technology as a teacher and a parent turned her into an “accidental activist,” she told me. “When you gamify lessons, you’re not enhancing learning, but holding students’ attention so they stay engaged with a product longer. That’s at odds with child development. Children should not be spending hours on a screen.” (Ms. Cherkin also worries about the student data that ed tech companies collect, often without parents’ knowledge. She is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the software company PowerSchool, whose 2024 security breach affected millions of children and teachers, exposing personal information to hackers who demanded extortion payments from schools.)