The majority of children, and I say this as having been one of them, are not self-motivated self-directed learners.
Maybe because you’ve been trained out of it? I’d argue that every person is a self-directed learner: A toddler learns to walk, to speak by imitating his environment—the motivation for this comes from him. So why should it be any different for a 12 year old?
If I’d been allowed to self-direct in middle and high school, I’d have played video games for 16 hours a day, barely taking breaks to eat and sleep.
The fact that you would have played video games all day seems to me to be a kind of cry for help. Video games are the least adult-directed activity there is, in a world where children can no longer go outdoors and find others to play with, freely, away from adults, as they once did.
In a world like the one I imagine, learning, expanding your skills, is as enticing as video games. What attracts you to video games is not a dopamine rush (otherwise the effect of educational games wouldn’t be so disappointing), but the feeling that you personally brought about what happened in this game.
And we can replicate that in an educational context as well, but not through stupidly gamifying what currently exists. But simply giving children the opportunity to approach everything in a self-directed way.
And this can also take place in a school, which, however, would no longer resemble the one we have today.
And by the way, video games are actually quite a good way to learn all kinds of skills. I’ve recently come across a paper by Benoit Bediou and his colleagues (2018) that reviewed all of the recent research (published since 2000) concerning the cognitive effects of playing action video games.
The analysis of the correlational studies indicated, overall, strong positive relationships between amount of time gaming and high scores on tests of perception, top-down attention, spatial cognition, multitasking, and cognitive flexibility (ability to switch strategies quickly when old ones don’t work anymore).
Other research by Linda Jackson and her colleagues (2012) has found significant positive correlations between amount of time playing video games and every aspect of creativity measured by Torrance’s Tests.
There is also a paper that has shown significant positive correlations between video gaming and the personality characteristic referred to as openness to new experiences (Chory & Goodboy, 2011).
Fair point. The post wasn’t necessarily meant for the rationalist community, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to share it here.
It’s my first attempt in a long time to write about things other than the start-up I’m currently building in the crypto space, so I certainly appreciate your input and will perhaps incorporate some of it in future posts. And I also apologize for doing this anonymously, but some things I express are perhaps not what I’d want people googling my name to read.
What Albert Einstein basically said are two things:
One needs stimulation [of the intellect] and the freedom to pursue your own [intellectual] interests. Both arguments are supported by scientific literature.
Intrinsic motivation has been shown to play a significant role in deep learning experiences (Bodkyn, C., & Stevens, F. (2015). And intrinsic motivation can not arise from coercion or fixed curricula.
Andy Matuschak describes this more eloquently than I can do:
Now we’re coming to your last point, which I don’t really buy:
When I talk about coercion, then this has nothing to do with corporal punishments. It is purely about intellectual coercion.
Let’s take again what I wrote in the post above about the 5 basic freedoms in an educational context—I don’t think a single one of them is being met by most schools today.
It’s a characterization of agency that challenges the systems and structures of most schools. Today, just as it did 70 years ago.