The right to waste time: video games and kids

(Cross-posted, with some modifications for a different audience, at The Clearwater School blog.)

Most SCT readers know my pedagogy is based on the notion that we do not learn best what someone else has decided we ought to learn. My model stems from the practices at the Summerhill, Sudbury Valley, and Albany Free Schools, which all downplay (if not outright dispense with) classes, grades, age segregation, and curricula. My educational heroes are people like A.S. Neill, Mary M. Leue, Ivan Illich, Hanna and Daniel Greenberg, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, John Taylor Gatto, Sir Ken Robinson, David Deutsch, Sarah Fitz-Claridge, Peter Gray. There are serious differences between these thinkers; they do not all agree with each other about everything (nor with me, more's the pity!) But their orientation towards democracy and children's rights is fairly clear.

Recently there have been two pieces of media that highlight aspects of this orientation. I commend both of them for the way they present these models in three-dimensions, so to speak.

The first piece is a new short (13 minutes) film recently produced by Sudbury Valley School. You can view it here at the blog of The Clearwater School (where I am a volunteer). (The embedded video is small, but if you click on it it will give you a full-screen option.)

About two and a half minutes into the film, SVS graduate Ben mentions that many parents ask, when they are first exposed to the Sudbury model of education, "But--what if my kid just plays video games all day?!" (Ben notes that this is more or less what he did during the first of his four years at the school.) This issue also comes up in the other piece I want to mention. The Brooklyn Free School was recently featured in an episode of N.P.R.'s This American Life. The segment (Act 3 in the show) addresses the school's commitment to empowering students with all the decisions involved in running their school, which includes the degree of use to which computers will be put.

There's a great deal more to both SVS's film and This American Life's radio segment than computer games and movies. But for the rest of this post I want to focus on this issue, because in my experience, Ben is right. This question comes up again and again, and as the Brooklyn Free School learned, it may need to be asked over and over again by the students themselves.

I volunteer at Clearwater, but I make my moderate living working for an after-school program at a public elementary school. My program allows me to give my students a good deal of autonomy, but the notion of letting them just "do what they want" brings reactions from my co-workers that range from blank stares to deep you're-joking-right? discomfort. Surely, it is assumed, it's my job to give them "projects"-- mini-lessons in science, art projects in clay or wooden craft sticks, songs we all learn together. Won't they just waste their time if I don't? And when it comes to computers (I am able to make the computers in the school library available for not quite an hour and a half every week) well, maybe they could be using the computer to, you know, research something or finish their homework, but you wouldn't let them just play games? or watch videos?

I'm going to mainly talk about games here, though a lot of my considerations apply to videos (and I mean either mass-media or homemade) as well.
The concerns that arise seem to me to be motivated either by concerns about content (potentially violent or disturbing images, actions or plots), or about the medium itself (computer games being a “waste of time,” “addictive,” and so on).

My thoughts on this are in process and revisable, but they are also the fruit of long reflection and practice. I should first say that I have a threshold for what I consider “appropriate” content at my work. This standard is far stricter than what would be countenanced at Clearwater (anything less than AO, the resident student tells me), or than I would eagerly welcome in my own home, for instance. The reason for this is simple: job security. One or two angry parents are all I have needed to encounter before I decided to err on the side of over-compensating caution. In general I am prepared to trust the school district’s internet filtering program, but I keep a close eye on the browsing and playing that students do. So far I've never felt the need to tell a child they couldn't watch what they were watching, but I've had plenty of discussions about online content with kids. What I've found is that kids (1) can take in a tremendous amount of variation in even a short while online, (2) are capable of thinking critically and creatively about it and will do so aloud with you if they trust you and feel the need, and (3) are very good at enforcing their own “screening.” Whether its a game that's too violent, or a Wikipedia article with too-much-information about sex, material that triggers kids' own internal repulsion does not stay on their monitors.

Computer games were in their infancy during my formative years and so I spent little time engaged in them as a child. (Arcade games held some appeal but were too noisy, cost more quarters than I wanted to spend, and I was rarely very good at them.) Consequently, I could not at first empathize with the unabashed enthusiasm for these games which I meet in kids. It took me a conscious and intentional effort to familiarize myself with them. I played alongside students and I played with my stepson. I have acquired a significant respect for the art and imagination of both the design and the play of computer games, which I almost entirely lacked when I first started working with students over a decade ago. Far from being a single monotonous activity (as the dismissal “just playing video games” might imply), such games are complex discrete units designed to build competencies in attainable steps. The advanced dexterity and the strategizing required will often hamstring anyone who tries to navigate one of the higher levels of a game before mastering the basics. This was borne home to me over and over, and it alone ought to have persuaded me that the notion that no learning was happening in these games was naïve.

It took me longer to come 'round than it might have; not because the games weren’t really learning tools, but because I actively resisted seeing them that way. It took me a long while to get over what I eventually conceded was a prejudice against the form of the game: I just didn’t like video games! I was reacting against the form; I found them strange and hard to understand, “cartoony,” and trite. My reasons weren’t all compatible (“too difficult” and “too simple,” for instance); but so long as I was content not to examine my motives, they tended to reinforce each other anyway.

My reticence was finally overcome when I asked myself: what's the salient difference between a computer game and any other game? Say, a computer version of Monopoly. I am not a fan of Monopoly--like most grown-ups I know, I find it tedious and frustrating--but I am at a loss to say why a board game that (despite my personal distaste) would never be banned from my classroom, should be any different from a version played on a screen. And once I have conceded this, I fail to see why games that more fully exploit the medium they employ are any less appropriate; indeed, they are arguably much more so, since they actually do familiarize players with the technology which is indisputably going to be no trivial part of our culture for the rest of our lives.

When I watch kids in my room play these games, I am struck by how social they are. They are not staring at a screen doing nothing; they are vocal, mobile, often jumping up to see what someone else is doing. They are excited, engaged, and interactive, not just with the game but with each other; far more so than they would be if, say, they were reading a book. Whatever is going on with the game, the kids are also navigating the always-more-complex-than-you-think terrain of peer society, not the least considerations of which are fairness and turn-taking, but also learning how to teach and learn from each other.

I regard the students in my class as capable of making responsible decisions for how they conduct themselves and I have found time and time again over ten years that they fulfill those expectations, and follow their passion if I get out of the way. But of course, students have more than one passion; the artist and the runner are often the same kid. A child has limits just as I do, and boredom sets in sometimes. In my experience, a child will indeed get bored with running, or drawing, or a computer game, in his or her own good time (and, chances are, not on my schedule), when they have stopped learning what they are interested in.

This is why, beyond all of the considerations I mention above, salient and even vital as they are, there is one concern which grounds my whole approach, and which would obtain even if I agreed (as I don’t) that computer games, or any other activities the kids pursued, wasted their time. It is often noted that my classroom style is somewhat “free.” This is a word I like and that I take very seriously. One of the most central values I have is respect for the autonomy of your children. Because my primary motivation is always to cultivate a respectful and honest relationship with each child, I want to give them exactly the same respect that I want for myself. It is true that sometimes I myself waste my time--by my friends’ standards, my family’s standards, even my own. I might fritter it away on television, or oversleep, or read a comic book, instead of working in the garden or writing my next essay. I might be decompressing after a hard day, getting valuable and much-needed down time; but let us assume I really am, even by my own standards, “wasting time.” Even assuming that this could be evident to the outside, I would still not want my wife or my best friend to tell me that I had to stop what I was doing, to impose a rule on my behavior that told me I had to do something more “worthwhile.” My wife might remind me that I have promised to wash the dishes; my friend might suggest that we have a jam session or even that I might find it rewarding to read this book he’s been recommending. But these suggestions are made in a very different spirit than laying down a rule or a demand. Would anyone say that the way to address this would be to invoke authority?

This is what it comes down to for me: respecting the right of a child to decide what to do with his or her time. And I have found that if I cultivate respect for the children I work with, I can have far more fruitful engagements with them about things that matter, including the things they will, sooner or later, wind up being "exposed" to--"adult content" included.

My pedagogical priorities

Elisa asks:
how do you cope with performance-oriented students and parents? How do you answer to reproaches such as that your person-to-person approach takes time out of frontal teaching and the like?

This is a really good question. It arose, as can be seen by a glance at the post Elisa comments on, in the context of a discussion of teen suicide, where I was sketchily referring to my pedagogical approach. I do not claim any special knowledge about suicide in general or how to prevent (or cope!) with it, but I do maintain that as a teacher my first and almost only priority is the cultivation of honest relationships with the youth I work with; not their grades, not whether they know their ABCs or their periodic table or Aristotle's categories. Any of these can come naturally enough in the course of a genuine relationship in which neither party tries to impose their private enthusiasms as the agenda for the friendship as a whole. I can share any amount of "knowledge" I may have if I am genuinely excited about it; the moment I try to give it to someone as something they "need," the reek of disingenuousness overpowers the room.

I do get raised eyebrows, and more. One fellow teacher opined that I "keep those kids on a very long leash." (Some remarks one can only allow to pass by in silence.) One mother has told me expressly that my job was not "to be her son's buddy," but to enforce his completing his homework. I have faced adults who were indignant that I would countenance the playing of video games. Happily, I can report that (so far) these are an anomalous and tiny percentage of adult responses.

Since I am employed not by the school system itself, but by a before/after-school program, I am not the one deemed primarily responsible for making sure the kids I work with memorize all the capitols of the 50 states, or even their multiplication tables. Nonetheless, I do get a good share of expectation that kids will finish their homework and so on. When this happens, I am very up-front with my students. I am frank with them about the expectations others have of me and how this gets passed on to them. They are still aware that they can opt out -- it is not their job to spare me their parents' frustration (misguided though I may consider it)-- but usually we realize that we are both faced with something that is easier got through together. There is no demonizing of "unreasonable" parents, though I am full of sympathy for kids who know very well that homework is a waste of time.

The most difficult thing for me is not the fielding of adult questions -- in those encounters, I am very frank about my respect of children's autonomy, and usually I at least get a break as a quaint liberal eccentric -- but the more insidious sense I have of being monitored and evaluated by criteria that is foreign to my own values. The challenge here is to be conscious of it, because it makes an unmistakable impact on my expectations of my students. I would just as soon trust the kids to make any decision that they can; but at the back of my head is always the awareness that someone can ask, Why is he letting them do that? The effect of this is to turn me in to a policeman or an overseer; I pass the feeling of being monitored on to them. Combating this in myself is the reason I am (as soon as I notice it) as honest as I can be with my students about where my own expectations come from -- whether they are genuinely mine, or whether they are something I feel obliged to impose because of others' expectations of me. Still, the snuck glances towards me, the way conversation drops to a whisper when I pass, testifies that I cannot overcome the surveillance to which children are accustomed. (Of course, they could also just be talking about how strange I am.) The contrast between this and the Clearwater School (where I volunteer one to two time a week for a half-day), is so stark as to make one wonder if the cultivation of the sense of being watched and checked up on -- which is not the same as being cared for -- is (whether intentionally or not) a primary function of ordinary school.

To be sure I have answered Elisa's question:

A "performance-oriented student" presents no problem at all; I am interested in what it's like to be them, and if they want my help with homework, I am ready and able. Whatever I can do with that kid, I will do.

When I get an objection from a parent, my response is that my priority is not to be liked by the child, but to have an honest relationship with them. So I can honestly say to them, "your parent wants this homework done, and I will help you do it." In other words, I can usually be true to my own values and still deliver the content-specific work that is expected of me. If I have to make a choice, I will choose respecting the autonomy of a child over getting an assignment done every time. This does not, by the way, mean no student is ever angry or frustrated at me (or vice versa); but they are (I hope) never merely cowed.

And, as I claimed to Elisa, while it is no guarantee of being spared pain, I believe that the more genuine the relationship with a student, the more natural (which does not always mean easier) it is to broach the very, very hard subjects.

"Oh, my favorite kids are always the rebels."

Sure they are.

All sorts of teachers say this. Even more say that they value creativity in their students. They genuinely believe this. But as we know, what we serve with our lips is not always what we treasure in our hearts.

A new study, which I found via Mind Hacks and The Frontal Cortex, reports that while school teachers self-report that they love creative students, when they actually describe the students they deem their own favorites and least favorites, it turns out to be the least favorites who sound for all the world like kids who in any other context would be called--creative.

There's more than one explanation for this, of course, but education theorist Sir Ken Robinson thinks it's in part because we educate our children to be "successful" or to "compete" in today's world, rather than to create tomorrow's. Robinson's presentation on this topic at TED is a bit on the laugh-a-minute side, but the substance is there and worth thinking long and hard about.

Peter Gray has another take on why public schools are as they are. After my last post on education, Richard mentioned an article by Gray. I've read Gray before but hadn't read this article. The readers' comments, as is so often the case on the web, are a frustrating mixture of mutual-admiration and catcalls from the peanut gallery, with the occasional well-thought-out (though hardly dispassionate) demurral. There were even one or two from people who said they'd gone to Sudbury Valley and felt it hadn't been the paradise it's sometimes said to be (imagine). But one, which I paraphrase, struck home with me. Yes, schools are more or less prisons--this is merely the consequence of not dodging the real meaning of "compulsory education"--but to really fix this would require extraordinary changes, not just in schools but in our whole societal structure. It is not simply a matter of better teachers, or better curriculum, or even replacing public schools everywhere with something more like Sudbury. The educational system is of a piece with the alignment of our national economy, our political systems local and national, our whole vision of ourselves as a society. To challenge it is to call for very deep-ranging practical steps that would (if ever implemented) change the way we live.

Beyond which, of course, it is also to challenge people's values--and God knows, nothing will get you in trouble faster than implying that people could do with rethinking their child-rearing decisions.

And, of course, it challenges our self-images. This, too, is a practical and not just a theoretical question. After all, if I don't really value the creativity in children that I say I do--if I don't know myself well enough to know what I really value--then how well do I even know what I am teaching?

Corrupting the youth

So in my day job, I'm a teacher. I work with students, grades k-5, at an after-school program. Sometimes this is more or less glorified daycare. Sometimes it is homework club, or basketball coaching, or any of a dozen or so improvised activities, mainly initiated by the kids I work with. I've worked in the schools, first as an AmeriCorps volunteer, then as a district employee, then at the after-school program, for ten years, and I have a fair idea, not especially nuanced but I think realistic and informed, of some of the realities in an elementary or middle school in my city. I've broken up fights between students as big as or bigger than me, administered tests, tried to help struggling kids catch up, and seen more than one go from non-reader to reader. I've seen things that would make you cringe, and "successes" by some standards that could bring a tear to your eye. Most of the time I find the work exciting, sometimes exhausting, always deeply rewarding. It is certainly the happiest I've ever been at a job.

I do have occasion to talk philosophy to the kids I work with. I stumped a number of them (and myself) with Heidegger's question "What is a Thing?" (the rule was, they couldn't use the word "thing" in the definition), and walked one or two through Cartestian doubt up to the cogito. One time I had a four or five laughing a bit too loud at the back of the bus over the Euthyphro, which at least one thought was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. But for the most part, I don't really try out the canonical stuff on them; it's musty and smells of footnotes, and the last thing most kids want after school is more school.

We do, though, talk a fair amount about education itself, and its relationship with freedom, and power. Because I am constantly taking mental notes on how to be a better teacher, I pay a lot of attention to when I hear kids complain or enthuse about something they are doing in school. I listen to their accounts of what makes a teacher "nice" or "mean," fair or unfair; what makes something interesting or engaging for them, or bores them to tears. I get a lot of practical, hands-on tips from these conversations (I once had a ten-year-old boy confide to me, in real big-brother, lemme-tell-you-'bout-us-kids fashion, that "It's okay to be a little mean"); but what I want to focus on here is the more general impression I get of their impression of school. Not all kids are articulate or reflective enough to intentionally paint a picture of this, but every one of them knows very well that they aren't in school because they choose to be. They regard it the way most adults regard work: a necessary evil, the lesser-of-two perhaps, and often the devil they know. They each sense on some level that they are being made to do things, which they would never, ever decide to do themselves. What is heartbreaking to me is the way they internalize the notion that this is somehow a good thing.

Let me be clear; we aren't talking about the them's-the-breaks of life, or the tough-luck unfairness of circumstance, or rolling with the punches and playing the hand that's dealt you. No one likes to have to adjust their life to the realities imposed upon them by happenstance, but ten-year-old children know very well the difference between happenstance and a decision, and they know the difference between a considered decision and an arbitrary one.

Whenever a new activity is announced in my class, the first question I get is always "Is it mandatory?" This is quite striking considering that the answer is almost always "no." The things kids have to do in my class in the course of a year can probably be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Their reaction thus indicates to me that they are so beset by "things to do" [read: things adults want them to do] that at the first sign of another one, they brace themselves.

And yet. Though they know very well the feeling of being put upon, the kids I work with have all more or less accepted that this is for their own good; or at the very least, that it's Just The Way Things Are.

I also volunteer one day a week at the Clearwater School. Clearwater is a Sudbury school; it's run using an "alternative" model of education, based on (and named for) the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. It's a radically student-centered mode of education in which children never. ever. take. classes. unless. they. want. to. There are no grades, and no age divisions (the five-year-olds and the fifteen-year-olds aren't kept rigorously separated or together); above all there are no rules that haven't actually been agreed upon by those who live by them.

These absences (no classes, no grade levels, no transcripts) are the things that stand out in people's minds when Sudbury education is explained to them, but the actual content of the model tends to pass them by. Sudbury education is radically participatory, radically democratic, and radically organic. Far from being little lord-of-the-flies centers where mere anarchy is loosed, Sudbury schools are communities that are run by the students, for the students. There are plenty of rules, but they are neither arbitrarily imposed from on high, nor artificially "decided on," as I've seen far too often in a traditional classroom, by a sham one-time meeting at the beginning of the school year when kids are manipulated into automatically mouthing and "agreeing to" the same rules they've lived with last year and the year before and the year before that. Above all, every student and teacher can vote on every issue affecting the school. This includes buying a new computer, refurbishing the music room, changing the rules about who can go off campus when, or hiring and firing of staff (teachers are re-elected to their posts every year).

The first day I volunteered there, I played a game of four square. I was never a big sports player in my own school days, and now that I'm at least a little more coordinated (and a little less invested in looking cool), I can finally enjoy this staple of the American playground. On the day in question, it took me a while to register that there was something different about the game. I couldn't put my finger on it. I was getting out with about the same frequency; I was playing no better or worse than usual. What was it?

Finally it dawned on me. It had nothing to do with how I was playing; it was that playing was all I was doing. I wasn't the ref.

At the public school where I work, if a dispute breaks out between kids over who is out, the immediate next step is to call my name. Whether or not I'm playing the game, whether or not I even saw the play, whether or not I know the kids involved, it's my job to make the call, as if by virtue of how tall I am. Have an argument? Where's the grown-up? But at this Sudbury school, though there had been a dozen or so close calls and disputes, not one kid had looked at me to resolve anything. Not even when one kid stormed off in anger did anyone so much as look at me as anything but another player. I should add that I knew all these kids already; they weren't unsure about me as a newcomer; it simply had never occurred to them that the adult in the group was the default decision-maker. My vote counted, but it was a vote, not a veto or an executive order.

No kid asks if they can go to the bathroom. No kid raises their hand before they get a drink of water. The notion that they ought to "wait till the bell" before eating the lunch they brought would be met with incomprehension. Bell? You mean, like Pavlov's dogs?

When adults hear about Sudbury schools, their initial question is likely to be "how do they learn anything?" In fact, it is not difficult to learn the rudiments of any educational competence. It takes approximately 100 hours for a motivated student to learn how to read, for instance; the real issue is waiting patiently for that motivation. (The Sudbury Valley school maintains that in over 30 years no student there has failed to learn to read.) What the question really reveals is a fear that the motivation will never arise; that left to themselves, children won't want to learn anything. It'll be too easy to just float. It doesn't matter that this is a surreally counterfactual fear.We've accustomed ourselves to not trust our kids. And they have met our expectations.

When kids first hear about Sudbury, their first reaction tends to be "Whoah." But it's not an unambiguously enthusiastic "whoah." Almost without exception, the public school kids I have talked to about Sudbury education have said, "that sounds really hard." And they're right.

At the school where I volunteer, there have been (among other things) music classes, French classes, cooking classes; kids pursuing Aikido, computer programming, film-making; writing and producing a play; caring for livestock. And yes, reading. Some learning to read; plenty of just plain reading. There are also lots of games. Computer games, board games, team sports, weird improvised invented mash-ups of basketball and softball and soccer, strung-together make-believe role-playing games that are really just long conversations.

What all these activities have in common is that they were all initiated by some student. At some point a child or a teenager approached a staff member and said, "I want to learn French" or "Will you teach me to play drums?" or "We should put on a play."

When the kids I work with say "That sounds really hard," this is what they are talking about. Every step of their education is up to them. It is hard. It is also, in my experience, indisputably more rewarding. Because everything a student formally learns is something they have decided to learn, what they internalize is far more than a degree of mastery over a "subject." They have learned that they can explore and that their exploration has real meaning and concrete results.

And the teachers? Aside from no-brainers like keeping kids safe (a task made markedly simpler by the Sudbury model's genuinely high trust in student responsibility), the teachers are there to pay attention to kids, to cultivate real relationships with them, a close real attention attuned to the actual interests of each one; to really be open to every request, and to make it happen when it's asked for. This might seem to multiply beyond control what a teacher needs to attend to--instead of teaching 5th grade math to 30 kids, I'm supposed to notice that he's interested in geology, she's into origami, they're asking about the civil rights movement, and that kid off at the other side of the playground is doing acrobatics? But in fact, working as a Sudbury teacher is far easier than teaching in a mainstream school. Aside from the absence of meaningless paperwork, every teaching encounter is fresh because it arises out of the actual relationship one has with the child. And, I ought also to mention, the lack of age distinctions means that children wind up teaching each other.

In contemporary mainstream American culture this model is so deeply counter to the widespread assumptions of our age, that it is not uncommon for people to refuse to consider a Sudbury school a school at all. I would submit that this critique might be better made of the enormous, and financially teetering, holding pens that our taxes fund primarily to free parents to work (so as to pay taxes), and to accustom children to surveillance and boredom.

Boredom. Ah, yes. Kids go through a lot of boredom at Sudbury schools--particularly students who have comes from a more structured school environment. It is constantly mentioned in the literature. The responsibility for one's own education is really just a subset of being responsible for one's life. There are big stretches of time when kids ask themselves what they feel like doing and come up blank. Of course this happens in a public school too, but there the boredom is rarely given much chance to last very long because the bell is always about to ring or the next subject is about to be taught. In fact, the very thing that cuts off boredom also cuts off interest--because you can't invest enough time to really get involved in anything when you've got to cover seven subjects in one day.

At an after-school program like mine, though, kids can get bored. The difference here is otherwise. I hear between two and ten complaints of boredom a week, I'd guess. I hear none at a Sudbury school. Kids get bored, to be sure--but not one of them assumes it is anyone's job but theirs to decide what to do about it.

I know that the picture I have painted could be disputed: too romantic, too Rousseauian, too naive. An excuse for lazy adults to do permissive teaching and spare-the-rod. Spare me. I'm a Platonist, but I'm an empiricist too, and I speak from experience. No, the kids I work with at the after-school program aren't miserable. They haven't had their love of life stamped out of them, or their creativity. This isn't because I've imported as many Sudbury-esque features into my class as I can adapt, but because the kids come from families who love them go to a school run by teachers who care, and because, well, they're kids. But little by little I see them accommodating themselves to a world whose guiding axiom--despite the loving parents, despite the caring teachers--is that they do not matter. This axiom is not foisted upon parents or teachers by evil men in a smoke-filled room; it's a function of the model of education as mass-production we've come to accept.

This long post on education is not an interloper or guest on my mostly-philosophy blog. I acknowledged an interest in contentious issues, and I know of little more likely to rile people than strong opinions about how to raise kids. But I'm not really trying to bait anyone here. My interest is philosophical. Philosophy has been about pedagogy from the very beginning, ever since Socrates got his famous double charge of not honoring the gods of the city and of corrupting the youth. From Plato's doctrine of anamnesis to Heidegger's remark that real teaching is letting-learn, education is the very essence of what philosophers do. Dewey remarked that "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." The examined life, I would add. And given the contrast between sitting in rows for six hours a day, and roaming around exploring the world however your fancy strikes you, I can't help but reflect further that, as Alphonso Lingis writes, the unlived life is not worth examining.