Gamification Will Not Solve "America's Education Crisis"

Education is in a tough place at the moment, but we badly need tech bros to stop telling us how to do it. Gamification is not the way forward. America's Education Crisis I was recently baited into checking out a video titled, "America's Education Crisis," by Cole Hastings. While most of the video is decent, I found the takeaways to be a little disappointing. As a result, I figured I could shed some more light on how to actually solve the education crisis. To get there, however, I'll save you some time by quickly summarizing the video. The video starts by presenting the concept of the crisis and giving a little history on public education. Cole then presents his theory on why he thinks there is a "decline in formal education." In short, he proposes five factors: The Teacher/Student Gap The Cost of Living Crisis The Devaluing of College Degrees Artificial Intelligence Smartphones He then spend the next 10 minutes (ignoring the ad break) unpacking each of these concepts. For example, he says that teachers don't want to teach because they aren't compensated enough—or as the chapter title is labeled, "teaching is no longer worth it." He then presents this idea that there is a massive generational gap caused by kids growing up on technology and the internet in a way never seen before. After that, he unpacks the idea of degrees being less valuable than skills. Cole uses this opportunity to talk about how kids are fed a steady stream of realities about the world, such as the increasing cost of living and the lack of availability of jobs. Cole argues that because children believe the world is so harsh, they do not feel motivated to learn. Finally, he gets to Artificial Intelligence, which he spends maybe 30 seconds on. In short, he shares the usual use cases of AI, such as summarizing books and cheating on exams. He then partially blames this reality on the education system for not properly rewarding students for learning. With the problems out of the way, Cole presents a set of key questions which read: How is Gen Alpha engaging with the world around them? How is that shaping their values and worldview? How can we naturally incorporate education into the things that already capture Gen Alpha's attention, or create similar experiences that are educational by design? How can we connect what students are learning to the real-world skills they'll need for their future jobs—while still emphasizing the importance of core subjects like math and reading, no matter the career path? To answer these questions, Cole skips over the first one and immediately jumps into the second one. He presents this idea that Gen Alpha has "algorithmic values," which he defines as "expectations shaped by platforms that reward perceived authenticity, viral content, and instant feedback." He further characterizes Gen Alpha as expecting "personalization, immediate relevance, and content that adapts to their interests." He then uses this opportunity to critique education as "static" and "one-size-fits-all." To answer the third question, Cole presents gamification, which he defines as "the process of applying game design and mechanics to non-game contexts to enhance engagement and motivation," as the solution. His justification for this solution is simply that Gen Alpha plays video games. He then cites a single study claiming that students in a gamified classroom outperformed their peers in traditional lectures by 40% (which I assume was based on some standardized assessment). Next, Cole points back to the need for personalized learning, and his solution is to make the educational pipeline more like college. Interestingly, his solutions are much less radical than he suggests, such as letting students choose books within a framework or teaching math through practical applications. After that, Cole covers the idea of compensating teachers better and the idea of making degrees more valuable without a lot of concrete details. Then, he closes out his video with the reveal that the whole video was a lazy advertisement for his upcoming course he's developing called "Critical Thinking Masterclass." Without getting too spicy, it would be nice if Cole himself used a bit of critical thinking to put this video together. Gamification Reinforces Existing Problems Near the end of the video, Cole states the following: We have the tools, the research, and the understanding to start building something better. But whether we actually do that, or just keep patching up the same broken structure depends on how seriously the message in this video is taken by the people who have the power to do something about it. The entire quote is really funny to me, but there are pieces that definitely jump out. For instance, the bolded phrase, "just keep patching up the same broken structure" is almost comical given the provided solutions. One of Cole's major solutions is "gamification," which is frankly just a modernization of the exact thing education has been doing since the end of World War II. This is not some radical proposal. It's a perpetuation of a system that does not work. Let me explain it this way: what are grades if not gamification? All of education is predicated on behaviorism and behavioral learning theory (i.e., the idea that students are black boxes that can be made to learn through external stimuli). Gamification is just another expression of that theory. I think it's quite clear that Cole is a behaviorist, not just from his solutions, but from the way he talks about learning. He literally discusses stimulation multiple times in the video: 8:27: Cole talks about restricting child usage of "stimulating" devices and again around 16:22: Cole pitches gamification as the solution to getting children their "stimulation." He also discusses the concept of reward at various points as well: 13:55: Cole claims the education system "underrewards" students for learning 14:51: Cole defines algorithmic values in terms of "reward" 17:00: Cole praises gamification for reinforcing learning by making it "rewarding" In fact, Cole even positions degrees as a form of reward which have devalued. I find this to be a somewhat gross framing of education because, again, Cole misses the point. If the real world is so bad that students feel too disengaged to learn, then the problem is the world, not education. Describing education as "static" and unwilling to change but proposing a solution that is fundamentally the same behaviorist garbage is just reinforcing that system with new bells and whistles. Likewise, Cole never takes into question the idea that a degree has value at all. Of course, if education is to be a commodity that is bought and sold, students are not going to see it as intrinsically valuable. Giving students personalized dopamine hits to trick them into "learning" is not a long term viable strategy. How will the students handle working a job if they can't do anything without "stimulation?" Again, Cole's solution is kicking the can down the road. Personalized Education Is Good While I've been harping on Cole's gamification solution, I do think that more personalized education is good. However, I think it needs to be self-guided, open-ended, and intrinsically motivated. Any effort to externally coerce a student into learning, whether through gamified reward or grades, is not sustainable long term. Just look at the way grades motivate through fear and pride while undermining the actual learning process. Furthermore, I think we need to stop obsessing over job skills. Education is not a jobs program, nor should it be. It is important for a populace to be educated, period. Of course, because corporations don't want to take on risk and prefer to offload as much of their costs onto society as possible, they've gotten away with coercing educational institutions into doing the job of apprenticeship. Not only that, but corporations have convinced students that it's the role of education to constantly adapt to the whims of industry. While I try my best to bring the real world into my classes as much as possible (such as using industry standard tooling), students still want as much fat trimmed as possible. I would not be surprised if we saw the eradication of general education requirements in my lifetime. The sooner we can get students the exact skills they need to do a job and no more, the better apparently. It's almost funny to me because there was a point in time where we all agreed that public education was designed to produce servile factory workers. College was the place you went if you wanted to break the mold. Now, that same public education system is just preparation for four more years of specialized job training with no opportunity to develop critical thinking or, god forbid, emotional intelligence. And, people wonder why I'm constantly fighting for more humanities in engineering education. The commoditization of education has truly rotted anyone's ability to question it beyond "how can education better train me to be a worker?" Doomerism Has Got to Go One thing I find really interesting about the current problems in society is how insurmountable they are posed. Even in Cole's video, he refuses to criticize Gen Alpha directly (or rather their influences) by instead leaning into this "doomer" mindset. In other words, Cole would argue that students hate education because they have no meaningful future. I find this doomer mindset so tiring. You see it everywhere, not just education. In fact, there's supposedly an entire antinatalism movement where no one wants to have kids anymore. In their mind, they see raising a kid in an environment where they might not be able to give them a life as good as theirs as child abuse. To me, this is cowardice; it's admitting defeat before even fighting. I'm sorry, but not educating yourself because it might not directly lead to a job is cowardice, and frankly ignorance. Not having a kid because they might struggle a bit more than you did is pathetic. Even if the world goes to shit, someone has to be on the other side to celebrate humanity's resistance. I had some personal gripes with the video that didn't quite make it into the article above, so I'll just drop them here. First, I find the idea of mirroring K-12 to college to be a funny one, especially given that the proposed solutions are not only milquetoast but are already happening. For example, Cole brings up the idea of teachers giving book choices within a thematic unit. That's already happening, brother. That happened in 2006 when I was in middle school. Likewise, Cole brings up this idea of letting students "pick subjects," which is like the letter I once wrote in high school to Obama: "Dear President Obama, You should let us choose where our tax money goes each year." This is a comically stupid decision, which would result in people defunding critical institutions. Doing the same thing from an educational standpoint would result in massive disparities in skills, just like we already see in higher education as folks chase money. It's particularly funny because he frames the K-12 to college mirror like its even possible for a middle schooler to decide what they want to do with their life. College students can't even seem to do that (nor should they). Not to mention that he undermines his point almost immediately when he says that almost a quarter of Gen Alpha will be working jobs that don't even exist yet. How are they supposed to know what skills to get then? Perhaps funniest of all is his claim that we keep fixing education with "patchwork" solutions while only providing what I would call "patchwork" solutions. After all, letting kids pick their own books is far from systemic change. In addition, this overall premise of catering the entirety of education to the individual seems like a recipe for disaster. If society is so bad that students are not motivated to learn, how is coddling them with their own individual rat-like learning space going to prepare them for reality? Also, he undermines his entire video when he uses it as an advertisement for his critical thinking course. Courses might be one of the most predatory scams on YouTube. Nothing like taking advantage of your parasocial audience for a quick buck. This is apparently not his first time selling garbage courses. He has your standard self-help course for $196. I suspect the first lesson of the critical thinking course is the moment you swipe your credit card. Ultimately, Cole seems to be another centrist in the sea of guys preaching "nuance" while shilling for the establishment. Every day, I find that the word nuance is just a fancy way of saying "I'm scared of commitment."