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    The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning
    The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning
    The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning
    Ebook323 pages6 hours

    The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

    By James Paul Gee

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    About this ebook

    One of the first champions of the positive effects of gaming reveals the dark side of today's digital and social media


    Today's schools are eager to use the latest technology in the classroom, but rather than improving learning, the new e-media can just as easily narrow students' horizons. Education innovator James Paul Gee first documented the educational benefits of gaming a decade ago in his classic What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Now, with digital and social media at the center of modern life, he issues an important warning that groundbreaking new technologies, far from revolutionizing schooling, can stymie the next generation's ability to resolve deep global challenges. The solution-and perhaps our children's future-lies in what Gee calls synchronized intelligence, a way of organizing people and their digital tools to solve problems, produce knowledge, and allow people to count and contribute. Gee explores important strategies and tools for today's parents, educators, and policy makers, including virtual worlds, artificial tutors, and ways to create collective intelligence where everyday people can solve hard problems. By harnessing the power of human creativity with interactional and technological sophistication we can finally overcome the limitations of today's failing educational system and solve problems in our high-risk global world. The Anti-Education Era is a powerful and important call to reshape digital learning, engage children in a meaningful educational experience, and bridge inequality.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 8, 2013
    ISBN9781137324115
    The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning
    Author

    James Paul Gee

    James Paul Gee has been featured in a variety of publications including Redbook, Child, Teacher, USA Today, Education Week, The Chicago Tribune, and more. He was formerly the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University.  He is a founder of the Center for Games and Impact at ASU which orchestrated a national conversation on games and learning for the White House Office of Science and Technology. Described by The Chronicle of Higher Education as "a serious scholar who is taking a lead in an emerging field," he is the author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

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      Book preview

      The Anti-Education Era - James Paul Gee

      1

      Orwell’s Question: Why Are Humans So Stupid?

      IN HIS CLASSIC FUTURISTIC NOVEL, 1984, GEORGE Orwell raised a particularly interesting question about us humans: why do we so often believe things that are manifestly false? Orwell had in mind the ways in which totalitarian regimes can get people to firmly believe things contradicted by obvious facts. But the phenomenon is by no means restricted to totalitarian regimes. It flourishes in free societies as well. It is a human trait easily exploited by politicians, charlatans, and the media.

      Polls repeatedly show that significant numbers of people believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old, believe that dinosaurs and humans were once on the earth together, believe in astrology and think that the stars affect their fate, or believe in ghosts and even think they have seen one. Currently, many Americans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and isn’t a citizen, and continue to believe, well past the George W. Bush presidency, that Saddam Hussein was one of the agents of 9/11.

      But the problem goes much deeper than believing in astrology. We humans are all exceedingly good at self-deception. Nietzsche said, The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others. I would say that we humans, all of us, are visionaries. We are exceedingly good at believing what we want and need to believe, even in the face of counterevidence.

      Research has long shown that humans display what is called a confirmation bias (sometimes called a myside bias). This is a seemingly built-in mental bias that makes humans favor information that confirms their beliefs. Because of this bias, people seek out and remember information that supports their beliefs and ignore information that does not. The human confirmation bias is strongest with highly emotionally charged issues or deeply entrenched beliefs. For example, in reading about issues such as gun control or abortion, people prefer sources that affirm their pre-existing values and beliefs. When faced with ambiguous evidence, they interpret this evidence as supporting their belief.

      The confirmation bias, because it leads to biases in seeking, interpreting, and recalling information, also leads to polarization. People who disagree about an issue like gun control or abortion can disagree ever more vehemently even though they are exposed to the same evidence. They interpret, accept, and ignore the evidence in different ways.

      Psychological research has exposed a great many other mental biases that cause the human mind to rush to false conclusions. But outside of such biases (which are probably a product of the evolution of the human mind), humans hold lots of beliefs that are simply folk theories long contradicted by empirical evidence.

      For example, the majority of people believe that human memory works like a video camera and accurately records the events we see and hear. But research on memory has long shown that human memory is fabricated, reconstructed, and transformed through use. It is not a veridical recording. We are deeply selective about what we remember. Memories can change in light of subsequent events as we replay our memories and use them to make sense of new experiences. Yet our court system invests a great deal of faith in eyewitness testimony and the belief that memory is on a par with a recording of the facts.

      This folk belief about memory is just one of a great many cases in which our everyday beliefs, many of which are entrenched in our institutions and our cultural practices, are contradicted by empirical work in science. Yet science has little power, it seems, to displace such everyday beliefs. In fact, in the face of social, cultural, and institutional agendas, science has little impact. The evidence for global warming, and that it is caused in significant part by human activities, is overwhelming. This does not mean global warming is true in the way a mathematical proof is true (that is not how evidence works), but it does mean that the pervasive way that evidence for global warming is ignored and misrepresented is a significant indicator of how little scientific evidence counts in crucial areas of life such as government, policy making, business, religion, and politics.

      All of these issues about the weakness of human thinking are well discussed in both the research literature and the popular literature on the mind. But this literature does not really get down to how deeply stupid we humans can be, despite calling ourselves Homo sapiens. Human history, up to today, is replete with people torturing, maiming, and killing each other in the name of religious or cultural beliefs. It is replete with greed and corruption that undermine the very societies the greedy and corrupt live in. After the 2008 recession, the largest since the Great Depression, we said the problem was that our banks and other financial institutions were too big to fail and had to be rescued at taxpayer expense. But then we made the banks even bigger as we allowed and even encouraged the stronger ones to eat up the weaker

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