That's No Fun

This is not a clickbait title.

Though it comes with some caveats.

A few weeks ago, my daughter started playing math and reading games for her school homework, and the teacher tracks the progress. She enjoys them, but I don't like them, and have mentioned it to several people over the last few weeks. They think I am insane, because when I say that learning shouldn't be fun, it goes against everything they believe.

I learned learning should be fun, too.

I learned wrong.

And as recently I have wondered why, I think it might have come down to the way they might have tested, the timeframe of testing, and what they looked at indicators of success. For example, if two people had zero skill in something as the baseline for the test, and one was taught the traditional "hard, boring, blood, sweat and tears" approach, and the other played games to develop the skills. It is very, very likely that the most improvement is going to be seen in the one that is having the most fun. At this point, the jury verdict is in,

Fun wins.

However, this doesn't take into consideration the potential overall goal of learning, which might be to become very good at something. It seems intuitive perhaps that in order to get good at something, it is best to start from having fun first. But, to be really good at something, it takes a lot of perseverance, and this means a lot of repetition which ultimately requires being able to overcome boredom, even though the tasks themselves are boring.

If children are learning through games and having fun, they aren't dedicating themselves to the object being learned, but to the emotion of having fun whilst learning. There is perhaps a subtle, but fundamental difference in this, because essentially what they are becoming are fun addicts. This means that as they grow, they are going to be predisposed to only doing things that give them the fun high, and that almost certainly won't be the process required to develop high skill levels.

While "learning should be fun" might seem intuitive, it is good to remember that our intuition is calibrated through our conditioning, not by some magical force that automatically knows right from wrong. This is why a lot of what we have learned to do and what actually works, are in conflict with each other. Just because we have learned that something is the best way, doesn't make it so.

Because we are starting kids learning by having fun at younger ages and with more compelling experiences, what we aren't considering that in order to keep it fun, it is going to have to get more and more fun as the learning gets progressively more boring. We are creating fun addicts and the more fun the experiences get, the more desensitized to the enjoyment the children become.

And, there is evidence of this in society and culture already, where simple pleasures like going on a picnic with family was considered a summer highlight. Now, it requires going to Disneyland, or on an overseas holiday. This is not to mention the time spent in front of screens, consuming narrow entertainment from a pool of resources which a person could learn about absolutely anything.

But, learning isn't fun.

People like the expected results from learning, but the vast majority of people don't actually like the process of learning. If they could snap their fingers and possess the skill, they would. Or, like the diet pill industry has again shown, if people can buy the result, they will.

But to buy the result, it means that there has to be an engineered solution, and those solutions are coming from people who have very high skill levels. If our innovation depends on skill levels, if getting to Mars, solving for clean energy, or cleaning up the environment require high skills from a few people, we have to consider the pool of people coming through the ranks. The smaller that pool is, the lower the skills required to compete and therefore, the lower the skills overall. Sports tells us this, because as the incentives to compete have risen, so too has the skill level, so a basketball team from today would wipe the floor of one from thirty years ago, because of boring learning.

The more advanced a topic becomes, the more boring it gets, because it comes down to fractions of improvement that are barely seen and take a long time and a lot of effort to acquire. Skill development starts off rapid, but plateaus to the point that the improvement is negligible. It is governed by diminishing returns for the effort required, but those minor returns can be the catalysts that lead to major developments.

If we start children off with a lot of fun learning, the expectation grows that this is the way learning should be, and that is just impossible. It is impossible to keep ramping up the fun in the same way it is impossible to keep ramping up the heron in the veins to reach higher highs. Eventually, the body overdoses.

And that is where we are heading with entertainment as a learning methodology, because while it might get people into a topic, the high required to keep them there is unsustainable. However, they will drift from one instance to the another, chasing the next high, but getting nowhere they feel valuable. Searching for meaning, purpose and connection, but not having the skills and commitment required to build them adequately to the point they can feel them.

Learning should be boring.

And perhaps this is where I am currently landing, where learning itself should be boring, with the excitement and enjoyment coming from the ability to apply what is learned well. Perhaps we should stop playing games and instead learn how to overcome the boredom of learning, so that we can really advance our skills and approach our full potential. Because, what we are doing now by learning a bit is falling into the Dunning-Kruger effect fallacy, thinking we know all we need to know. But, if we were able to push through the boredom and learn more, than we will learn how much there is yet to learn, and that is exciting.

I'd be interested to hear about the skills you consider at a very high level, how you learned them, apply them, and improve them.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]