The Doom of Education

 "Sesame Street ruined education." So said a friend of one of my family members, a seasoned educator of elementary children. His assertion was that in joining entertainment and learning at the hip, Sesame Street (and now Dora, Diego, Prodigy, Reflex, and so many others) had established an expectation that education must be entertaining. The idea that learning can be complemented by entertainment, especially on the screen, morphed into the expectation that learning without entertainment will not work.

I presently oversee a good deal of my children's learning because we chose to enroll them in online education this term. The saintly teachers at our local school district mediate the curricula and online learning platforms, but the bulk of monitoring and question-answering falls to my wife and me. As a result I have been given a window into the media that convey lessons to my kids.

There are a lot of cartoons.

There are a lot of expanding and shrinking stars that dance across the screen at the completion of a lesson.

And in the case of, say, Prodigy (a math game designed to "encourage a growth mindset and foster success"), there is a whole lot of clicking an avatar character around a cartoon map with a few math problems thrown in.

As you brace yourself to tolerate another "back in my day" diatribe, let me say that I have fond memories of when my teachers discovered that PowerPoint allowed them to make a Jeopardy game out of course material. (Take a moment to figure out my age. Then keep reading.) I experienced lots of Fridays at school in which we played games with our vocabulary and problem-solving skills. And we sometimes even got candy for prizes.

Let me also put to rest your suspicion that I'm going to say learning ought to be a drag. I find education, by offering new vistas of understanding and by building new skills, a positive experience. I think discovery itself is fun and success in learning brings its own joy.

But I want to draw a distinction between the joy of learning and entertainment. I want also to draw a distinction between receiving some form of entertainment as a reward for learning and receiving entertainment as the medium through which learning is expected to occur. I use the word "medium" here pointedly, as in Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message." I think it is dangerous to embed learning in entertainment precisely because we will gain the implicit understanding that if something is not entertaining it's not worthwhile to learn, or we will excuse ourselves from the learning with something about "learning styles" or a lack of ability. Learning will become a subset of entertainment.

I believe, as I wrote, that learning brings a reward. We receive the satisfaction of correctly completing a geometry proof. We finally figure out the key to a wiring diagram on a Zetor tractor so we can fix the heating fan. We work over an obscure bit of Schleiermacher until we grasp its meaning and it opens up our world. We practice suburi with our bokkens until we memorize the flow of the sword blade.

But the process of learning may not be--I dare say probably will not be--entirely fun. It will not do what entertainment does: allow us to passively receive pleasure produced by someone else. There will be moments of frustration and moments of choice in which we could forfeit the whole enterprise if we do not persevere. Especially in learning the hardest, most important parts of life--like how to be reconciled to someone whom we have injured--I think that entertainment is antithetical to learning and the habits being learned. One who expects learning to be forever fun will never be able to learn those kinds of skills.

I have not reached a place in my meditations from which I can propose a method by which to stem this tide that I see. But perhaps you have and, I hope, are already pursuing it. Or perhaps you can observe with me and discern whether what I'm describing is accurate and, if so, look with me for an adequate response. It would seem to me better to encourage now a culture of joy in rigorous learning than have to cure a culture that rejects any task not entertaining enough.

~emrys