Archive for March 28, 2006
Why education sucks.
While granted you got essays and other open ended research subjects we teach as if conclusions on everything have been reached. If there’s one thing to learn from video games it’s that an open ended environment in which people create their own meaning has a tendency to create situations that are memorable, but perhaps not always meaningful. Teaching history or science or math as closed systems in which the teacher is orator or in which the end has already been revealed seems like a nice way to further reinforce the same boredom that anyone feels when someone tells them what to do. Ignorance is key to education, it is the state in which one wants to learn versus the history book or the english book which already has a solution. That the present is the only story we’re allowed to create actively is what makes it precious, if we can’t create a greater level of flexibility in instruction and do away with definitives in some cases then we’ll always be stuck with a mass of people with little enthuasism to sit through another day of a system that they don’t control. My point being, let’s just leave some stories blank and let kids create their own story through research and interpretation. Let the finished ones, the ones vital to cultural understanding be the cut scenes in a system that rewards the more interactive use of the history of thought.
technorati tags: education
links for 2006-03-28
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not as impressed with this as I thought I would be, but I did like the windwaker game. anyway, new zelda for DS. looks kinda cool in the touch screen implementation, but the game itself looks a little old school in the overhead aspects.
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part 2 of the centipede mouse videos. from screenhead and cynical-c
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from wondershowzen and screenhead.