If pure sugar is providing children with more instant gratification, healthy food should improve their product by adding way more sugar and salt too!

If heroin is providing adults with a better escape, real life should step up its game!

Or, maybe we should teach our children a modicum of discipline.

Rather than fighting for the attention of children, education should be where their attention is already focused.

Yeah, it’s called “Aiden! Don’t look at your phone while I’m talking. What did I just say about multiplication tables?!”

Yes, and after you say that to all 30 students you've wasted 1/3rd of your class time.

The problem / challenge there is that school isn't very stimulating, or, not for everyone - school, especially elementary and secondary school, are based more on discipline and forcing people to learn a basic curriculum, whether they like it or not. If they get distracted by their phones or whatever they'll run behind, score low on their tests, end up in a lower secondary / tertiary education, aaaand have to settle for an okay job.

Kids are very easily distracted, and the current school systems are designed to deal with those by removing distractions and forcing a bit of discipline.

The alternative would be more personally optimized education, but that's a lot more expensive and harder to scale - and teachers are already an underpaid and overworked demographic.

Besides, kids that age use their phone more for social contacts and distractions than learning stuff.

You realize that it is impossible to beat mobile apps at gratification versus teaching science for example? It is impossible to learn math by reading clever anecdotes with numbers, students have to solve multiple repetitive problems themselves or it doesn't work at all. And current mobile games? Take some modern mobile rpg - they auto fight and auto quest, you just sit and watch new items dropping and levels increasing. Try to beat that gratification with any substantial learning class.

I understand what you're saying, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean we should give up or not try.

I don't think the competition is fair. The requirement to teach useful things to children makes it substantially harder to design experiences that are as stimulating as pointless distractions.

I agree, schools have failed on this point.

So in your view a school's main product is entertainment?

In my view, education is more effective if it is also entertaining. There's no particular reason why pedagogy can't take advantage of nearly ubiquitous computing hardware, other than the textbook and curriculum racket that publishers are running.

The mammalian instinct for play is essentially a learning mechanism. All it takes to educate is to structure a game such that the lessons being learned are useful in the real world. We run around in open gaming worlds collecting tokens for no greater purpose than to make numbers bigger; we can easily adapt that to collecting knowledge for the purpose of getting smarter.

Imagine if the crafting system of an open-world game used actual chemistry and metallurgy. Kids could be trading tips on textiles and steel so that they can make non-anachronistic weapons and uniforms before doing a boss raid on Napoleon's army. Imagine if making a battle rifle with better stats in the game required you to know how real rifles work. Imagine the sort of teamwork that could take place if everyone in the clan/guild were required to be logged on in the same room at a specific time every weekday. The teacher turns into the quest-giver, and the reward is leveling up your brain, and maybe in-game currency that can be used to buy avatar prestige items.

Each state could certainly afford to hire a few developers, to make educational games that poke the very same skinnerbox dopamine buttons that the purely entertainment games poke. Each state could hire some video artists to produce educational content. I may have retained more from professional programs like "Connections" or amateur videos like "History of Japan" than I ever kept from my textbooks.

It has always been a mistake to make school boring. School is boring now because a boring school is cheap (relatively speaking), and it still works just well enough to keep civilization from collapsing. The curriculum/textbook/lecture model was necessary when education was limited by labor, such that every N students require 1 teacher, but now instead of compartmentalizing education into fixed classrooms with one specific teacher and N specific students at a time, we can have 10000 of the best teachers teaching 10 million students at once, such that they can each learn and demonstrate mastery at their own pace. And this move by France is one step away from that.

> All it takes to educate is to structure a game such that the lessons being learned are useful in the real world.

This!

There's a game my 7 year old couldn't put down until he finished it. It teaches the concepts of basic Euclidean geometry. There are similar ones for algebra and programming that is a little bit beyond him now, but I'll try him on them again in a few months/year.

He also has made these contraptions with random materials. A hammock out of a bit of surplus netting, for instance. I'm pretty sure hours of Minecraft helped with the desire to create things.

Now I do need to find a gamification of basic logic and critical thinking...

You have expressed this better than I could have. Indeed, we should put in effort to make school fun and entertaining. Learning is a life long process, and if the first thing you learn is that learning is boring you are less likely to engage in it and therefore you will be less adaptable to the situations life puts you in. As teachers we should make sure that learning is fun.

You might find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaBte1cBi5U

This is exactly right, thanks for posting that!

Not Op, but if it only were entertaining.

If I had to guess, probably 80% of my school time was idle time so boring it felt like sensual deprivation.

There was little else to do than bullying each other.

If phones would've been a thing back then I'd remember rich experiences instead of the destructive time sink I remember now.

(Germany, school from 1996 until 2009; currently working on econ PhD)

I had a lot of sensual deprivation as a teenager too :/

Oh my. Fair enough. :D

"Sensory deprivation".

How is failing to exploit the flaws of humans a bad thing?

... when you are free-market-libertarian without a cause