Fire and Knowledge

59% of teachers would consider using video games in schools

When teachers think this, you know we are in trouble.

The majority of teachers questioned believed that playing mainstream games can lead to improved skills and knowledge, with 91% feeling that those who played games developed their motor-cognitive skills, and 60% felt that users would develop a higher order thinking skills and could also acquire topic-specific knowledge.

“I am excited and intrigued by the prospect of using gaming technology in the classroom. Individualised learning, at rates hitherto thought impossible, may be the norm if we get it right,” said Marius Frank, Head Teacher at Bedminster Down School in Bristol.

The real way of mending a man’s taste is not to denigrate his present favourites but to teach him how to enjoy something better.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 112

Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread. When the art of reading poetry requires talents hardly less exalted than the art of writing it, readers cannot be much more numerous than poets.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 98

Today is the birthday of William James, American philosopher and psychologist, elder brother of Henry James. He was born in 1842 and died in August 1910. His most famous work is The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902). The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy says that “he was one of the first theorists to suggest that humans, like other animals, possess instincts. He also opposed then-dominant views by arguing that human identity is grounded not in metaphysics but in behavior.” Here is a quote in celebration.

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

—William James, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth (1907)

[E]very book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment, in this sense, is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 91-2

[G]ood reading is always aural as well as visual. For the sound is not merely a superadded pleasure, though it may be that too, but part of the compulsion; in that sense, part of the meaning. This is true even of a good, working prose.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 90

Interactive learning fails reading test

INTERACTIVE computers used in British schools to teach children to read are harming their learning, research shows.

Specially designed software is increasingly replacing traditional teaching in the classroom as part of the Government’s £1.7 million ($4 million) push to integrate computers into all lessons.

Parents have also bought into the enthusiasm for technology, spending millions on educational computer games for their young.

However, research published in the journal Education 3 to 13 has found that pupils who use interactive programs cannot remember stories they have just read because they are distracted by cartoons and sound effects.

Describing some software as “more entertainment than education”, the researchers have warned teachers and parents not to abandon simple storytelling and reading books to young children.

[The academic discipline of] ‘English Literature’ directs to the study of literature a great many talented, ingenious, and diligent people whose real interests are not specifically literary at all. Forced to talk incessantly about books, what can they do but try to make books into the sort of things they can talk about? Hence literature becomes for them a religion, a philosophy, a school of ethics, a psychotherapy, a sociology—anything rather than a collection of works of art.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 86