Games in the educational process from James Guy: innovative thinking or scientific occultism for the masses?

Famous American researcher James Paul Gee (James Paul Gee) - one of the active propagandists of reforms, not only in the modern humanities and social sciences, but also in school education. Revolutionary and provocative by nature, James Guy exposes the shortcomings of modern school education in the US in the same way as he denounces social injustice and irresponsible attitude of society to the use of natural resources. To the discussion about the future of school education in the United States, Guy did not come immediately, but already having a rich experience of "revolutionary activity" in other areas: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, literacy in the broad sense - it is in those areas of knowledge about man that in recent decades have generated Serious impulses for the profound transformation of the humanities and social sciences in the West. New approaches to scientific activity have made in science the transition to a new state and a new stage of development - Postmodernism. Russia has successfully passed this paradigm shift, and therefore we can look at this development as if from a side, with a critical and evaluative view.

What famous James Guy

In the activity of the scientist, you can trace several stages in which he appears as if in different hypostases: the GI-linguist, GI-sociologist, Ki-researcher of video games. Peru, a well-known researcher, owns a lot of books, sustained in the spirit of postmodernism. In fact, throughout his scientific career, the scientist has been studying the possibilities of discourse analysis in psycholinguistics and social science, and in recent years has moved to thoughts about the introduction of his ideas and their dissemination to the masses.

After playing video games at a fairly mature age, James Guy became an active promoter of their introduction into the school curriculum, as he considers them an effective means of developing system thinking. Previous attempts to introduce systemic thinking in American secondary education were unsuccessful and resulted in the degradation of the intellect of young Americans, their loss of competitiveness in the intellectual sphere, where they are increasingly replaced by immigrants from countries with a more effective school system.

Games of postmodernists

The ideas of postmodernists were perceived in the Western humanities at first with difficulty, but then they almost completely mastered the minds of most scientists, becoming, in fact, a new scientific paradigm. Instead of the previous mechanistic perception of man and society in classical philosophy and sociology, another model was proposed based on the idea of conditionality and subjectivity of people's ideas about the world, as well as the dominant role of ideology in the development of society, or rather the competition of different ideologies. The world of postmodernists is like a large computer video game, in which simple, easily comprehensible rules operate. This simplified model of the world and society works well in various studies, but in an attempt to use it to explain the whole diversity of phenomena of the surrounding reality, it turns out that it lacks something very important. Like any conceptual model of reality, the postmodernist worldview remains schematic and is suitable only for limited research needs.

The Ideology of James Guy for High School

Unfortunately, we can not in this article reveal the full scale of the personality of James Guy and even assess his contribution to the development of the humanities. We will try to focus only on his ideas in the field of education: in this field the scientist has devoted his activity in recent years.

In essence, Gu's ideas in education are an attempt to apply the discourse analysis method in social practice. Confident that his scientific method successfully penetrates the true motives of people, understands the reasons for their actions and predicts the life perspective, James Guy proposes to "open his eyes" to the "true" principles of the world order not only to the followers of his scientific school, but to all young Americans directly On the school bench. It is this "diploma", according to the scientist, is vital for children, and not so much the ability to read or write.

Calling the school system

Being a revolutionary in science, Guy expresses radical reformist ideas in the field of education. According to the scientist, the classical school system with a tradition of thousands of years does not give the person the most important literacy, namely the ability to give social reality a social assessment, to see what system principles are put into social construction, and to understand to whom it is profitable (where you are already talking about You heard this?). The GI program is a protest against brainwashing at school, preserving it as an institution for the transfer of skills and social traditions. The scientist reads that the school should not produce "cogs" for society and the state, but - producers of ideas and innovations. But especially Guy is outraged that the school failed to expel the religion from society, that most Americans so failed to convince that life in the universe arose accidentally from non-living matter, and they themselves - by evolution from monkeys.

Innovation in learning from James Guy

The applied part of the linguistic and social theory of Guy is the unconventional approaches and methods of teaching that he proposes to introduce in secondary school. Only one of these methods is video games, which the researcher devotes a lot of time to studying. James Guy proposes to abandon the conventional perception of video games as a means of entertainment, but instead, using the original method of the scientist, to see in them the intent of the creator. In every popular video game, Guy finds some sense: one develops speed and reaction speed, the other - forces to solve complex problems, including in cooperation with other participants, etc. But most importantly - video games allow a person to feel for a short time a creator of a certain reality. According to Guy, this feeling should be transferred to the real world, to the level of communication with people, professional activity.

What gives the game?

James Guy is fascinated by video games, but not only as simply a gambler, but also as a scientist. He claims that a video game participant acts as a drafting engineer who formulates hypotheses about how rules interact, sets goals and achieves certain results depending on the choice of the right strategy.

According to James Guy, the use of video games in the learning process opens the possibility for a person to comprehend a new reality, develops the ability to system thinking and analyze not only a fictional, playful, but also completely objective reality. Such a useful skill is a classic school program with all evidence does not.

Evaluation of James Guy's ideas in the field of education

The views and ideas of Guy in education are very original and unconventional. They hardly fit into the modern educational system and, as the scientist expects, can cause a great deal of systemic opposition in the implementation. Nevertheless, Guy is confident in the need to develop systemic thinking, creative abilities, the desire to analyze the surrounding reality and draw conclusions from this analysis. All this is really not enough for a modern American school, and you can not argue with that. However, a similar "deadly" diagnosis should not be put to educational systems, for example, Finland, Japan or Israel, where they find a balance between scholastic traditions and modern game elements of education. Therefore, system thinking is not always a kind of secret, occult knowledge, but a normal product of the intellect, which is developed with the correct approach to learning.

The use of video games in large numbers requires preliminary testing and testing. It is known that children can not always easily understand where the video game ends, and where - life begins with real rules, laws and quite tangible, and not virtual consequences of actions. In this sense, the video game does not contribute to adaptation in objective reality. The benefit that Guy is talking about is only expected or planned, there is no confirmation from the scientist yet. Therefore, making radical changes to established programs and institutions, we will not rush. On the other hand, we can not exclude the possible benefits of video games, the more the author of the idea agrees that they can be only one of the tools in the arsenal of high school.