Against gamification

In The New York Times, Molly Worthen, a professor of history, writes against the gamification of education:

No technology is philosophically neutral. The apps and games that provide a simulacrum of educational progress also encourage students to absorb a certain worldview, an idea of what they should strive for. They end up with the impression that learning is a matter of box ticking, pattern recognition, completing discrete tasks and “leveling up.”

When they get to college and face open-ended essay questions and other forms of ambiguity — when they begin thinking about what they should do after graduation and try to figure out the point of it all — they panic. When a professor asks them to read an entire novel, the task feels overwhelming.

They got into college by mastering a gamified system. But that’s a false picture of the world. Take it from Emerson. He wrote in “Self-Reliance” that real education requires a person to learn that there is no algorithm for fulfillment: “Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil.” Serious intellectual work and moral reasoning cannot be gamified.

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