The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

258 Pages·2013·1.08 MB·English

by  James Paul Gee

THE
Anti-Education
ERA
Also by James Paul Gee and available from Palgrave Macmillan
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
Women and Gaming
THE
Anti-Education
ERA
CREATING SMARTER STUDENTS THROUGH
DIGITAL LEARNING
James Paul Gee
To the Nine: Bandit, Bene, Bolt, Conrad, Harley, Micah, Muffin, Rolle, Witten.
And to the One and Only: Bead.
THE ANTI-EDUCATION ERA
Copyright ©, James Paul Gee, 2013.
All rights reserved.
®
First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s
Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a
division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and
representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe
and other countries.
ISBN: 978-0-230-34209-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre Inc.
First edition: January 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Preface
1 Orwell’s Question: Why Are Humans So Stupid?
PART I
HOW TO BE STUPID
2 Short-Circuiting the Circuit of Human Reflective Action
3 The Limits of Human Memory
4 Mental Comfort Stories
5 Lack of Context
6 Lack of Experience
7 Pitfalls along Our Search for Status and Solidarity
8 Words Gone Awry
9 Lack of Agency
10 Institutions and Frozen Thought
11 Fact-Free Stories That Sound Good
12 Imagined Kin
13 Lonely Groups of One
14 When Not to Trust Experts
15 evading Knowledge
16 Flight from Complexity
PART II
HOW TO GET SMART BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
17 Inclusive We: How We Can All Get Smarter Together
18 Big Minds, Not Little Minds
19 Mind Visions and New, Better Worlds
20 Synchronized Intelligence: Getting Our Minds and Tools in Synch
21 Interlude to Forestall Possible Misunderstandings
22 Getting Smarter Before It’s Too Late
References
Index
Preface
AFTER MANY YEARS OF STUDYING PEOPLE I HAVE become
intrigued, as have many others, by how a species named for its intelligence
(Homo sapiens: wise or knowing man) can sometimes be so stupid. Depending
on how you look at it, humans are either marvelously intelligent or amazingly
stupid.
We build great cities in the desert, cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix. Then
we waste and pollute the desert’s already short supply of water. We pour
concrete on the ground and spew carbon into the air to make the heat of the
desert ever hotter.
We wage vast public health campaigns to save poor people across the world
from infectious diseases. Then we kill lots of them in endless wars.
We know how to make some people richer than whole countries, people like
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and six members of the Wal-Mart Walton family.
Then we leave whole countries to starve.
In the United States, many people take the moral high ground on abortion
and the sanctity of human life. Then they let a great many children and adults
suffer or die in the United States because they have no health care and across the
world because they have nothing to eat.
We use our financial genius and newly minted MBAs to create amazingly
complex new financial instruments like derivatives and credit default swaps.
Then we use them as financial weapons of mass destruction and devastate the
global economy. We go on to reward those who brought on this vast destruction
with bailouts and bonuses rather than punish them with jail terms.
We spend over two hundred years creating a vibrant two-party system
capable of solving problems like going to the moon. Then we mire our politics in
ideological and cultural debates just at the time when we face major global
economic, environmental, and civilizational problems that could bring on
Armageddon, problems that demand pragmatic, not ideological, solutions.
We create military technology that is the envy of the world and capable of
great “shock and awe.” Then we manage to wage two massively expensive and
not all that successful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and go on to decry our
massive federal deficit.
We create marvelous new digital media that bring people more information
about and more perspectives on the world than ever. Then people customize
their media to the point where they live in filter bubbles and echo chambers
where they never need hear anything they don’t already agree with.
We discover the magic of how to turn plants into fuel (biofuel). But then, in
a world where lots of people are starving, we actually make fuel out of food like
corn, raise the price of food, and starve the poor yet more, which is all a bit like
Midas turning food into gold. Perhaps we will be smart enough eventually to
make fuel out of fungus rather than corn.
Humans have, of course, always been really smart and they have always
been really stupid. Early human groups learned to cut down trees and hunt
animals and then they sometimes cut and hunted the trees, animals, and
themselves into extinction. After all, if the Native Americans had not killed off
all the New World horses, they would not have been easy prey for the Spaniards
on their Old World horses.
But the problem of us humans being a dumb smart species today is different:
our human intelligence has now created a highly complex, fast-changing, and
very risky world. The cost of mistakes in this world is now often way too high
for individuals and whole societies to bear. In a fast-changing global world
replete with complex interacting systems, human actions can bring on all sorts of
disastrous unintended consequences. Viruses take rides on jets along with
humans; a new Wall Street financial product wipes out economies throughout
the world; jobs float to the lowest cost centers in the world, shuttering whole
towns and cities in the United States; economic collapse and global warming
send hordes of poor immigrants across the globe.
In a developed country like the United States, where inequality is high and
there are a great many poorly paid service jobs, but not all that many highly
rewarded “knowledge production” jobs, people face a wealth of high-risk
decisions. What is worth knowing? What skills are needed for a fast-changing
world? Does real education happen in school or out of it? How much of a child’s
fate is already determined by what has happened at home before school? How
can one prepare for massive and unpredictable changes in the world? How can
we keep the trains of our polarized politics, vast worldwide disparities in health
and wealth, massive flows of money crisscrossing the globe as mere numbers in
computers, and out-of-control environmental problems from running off the
cliff?
As developed countries like the United States and emerging economies like
China and India use up and pollute the world’s resources, how will they face the
massive flows of immigrants and worldwide wars created by shortages of water,
food, and human dignity? How will developing countries ever enter the modern
global economy when resources are scarce, corruption is rampant, and the
developed world is awash with deficits and ideological conflicts?
Where is new thinking going to come from in a world polarized by ideology,
religious conflicts, and vast degrees of inequality? We humans today have the
best tools we have ever had—thanks to technology, digital media, and social
media—to be smart. But these tools will not make us smarter all by themselves.
Indeed, in many ways today, they are making us dumber. We need to change
who we are as humans. We need to respect Mother Nature. We need to find the
seeking of evidence as sexy as the trading of ideology. We need to innovate
before it is too late. We need to make more people count and let more people
participate.
But in this book I am not primarily interested in the fate of society and the
world. That fate is too big to think about all at once. I am primarily interested in
my fate and the fate of my children. I am primarily interested in your fate and