Up@dawn 2.0

Sunday, April 19, 2026

Don’t panic

You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education

“…When they get to college and face open-ended essay questions and other forms of ambiguity — when they begin thinking about what they should do after graduation and try to figure out the point of it all — they panic. When a professor asks them to read an entire novel, the task feels overwhelming.

They got into college by mastering a gamified system. But that’s a false picture of the world. Take it from Emerson. He wrote in “Self-Reliance” that real education requires a person to learn that there is no algorithm for fulfillment: “Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil.” Serious intellectual work and moral reasoning cannot be gamified.”


Molly Worthen
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/opinion/schools-edtech-laptops-games-learning.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

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Don’t panic

You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education “…When they get to college and face open-ended essay questions and other forms of ambiguity ...