Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

Thankfully for both GK and the teens we work with, we don't have that luxury. As nobody mandates that teens be involved in our afterschool programs or online education programs, we need to use a market based approach. If something doesn't work, isn't interesting and engaging, nobody will come and participate. Imagine if our public schools worked like that. If you don't like a given class or teacher, just don't go! It would be an interesting study to see where kids ended up. (Unfortunately, many high school students take this approach anyway. Truancy, anyone?)

On the extreme end of this market based approach you have someone like Will Wright, creator of SimCity, The Sims, and a general guru of games that are engaging and inherently educational. In an chapter I recently read about Will in the book Smart Bomb, I found his distinct opinion on young people and education:

Will warns... that if you try to give kids something they think is educational they won't touch it. He says the only way to reach kids, to make them engage with something, is through the commercial markets. "You know it only gets so far when a teacher holds something up and says, 'Here kids, we're going to do this,'" Will says. "Or the parents bring it to the kid and say, 'Here, I want you to play Math Blaster, Johnny,' as opposed to the kid saying, 'I want that, I want that, so-and-so is playing it and it's really cool.'

It can be said that Will, while generally agreed upon as a genius, has somewhat of a personal bias here given that he's a commercial game designer and has interest in promoting this view. But even beyond that, while most parents and teens will agree that it's easier to get a young person to play The Sims than it is to do their homework, I still believe that something is amiss here. Kids behavior in regards to learning is far more nuanced than this. I take myself as a case in point. When I had a good class in high school or college, I was taken with it. Smitten with ideas, concepts, theories, facts, I would devour books or push out pages on top of pages for assignments, simply out of passion for a given subject. And I know that I'm not alone in this.

But beyond the 'passion' factor, many young people are active learners in school and out because they understand the ramifications of being otherwise. We all do this to varying degrees. We realize that yes, even though we don't love math we need to balance our checkbooks, even though we don't like legalese we still need to learn a bit of it before we unwittingly sign away our power of attorney, people read newspapers or keep up with current events because they know that their lives are being effected by what's happening in the world, even when they may not do so out of passion. I would call this the 'bitter pill' aspect of education and learning, and something that is unfortunately at the heart of many educational approaches. "We know you don't love it now, but it'll be good for you down the line..." or "You'll thank us when you're older." are the maxims that exemplify this.

For me, the question is this: Neither of these extremes seems to make sense as the sole basis upon which we create an effective educational approach. I don't believe that all education and all the learning that we need to do in life will be "fun", and I don't believe that a quasi-neoliberal market based approach to all learning would result in a world that I'd want to live in, let alone one that would effectively teach all things that young people need to know. At the same time, I know that there's great power in learning that's incredibly engaging and that a learner wants to engage in rather than resents engaging in. So what's the right balance? And again, to hark back to my original question at the beginning of this post, where does Global Kids and our work fit into that balance, and what are we doing to figure that out? Perhaps, another post. :D