Video Games Are the Future of Education

Then I'm very confused by what you originally wrote:

> Large parts of Africa and almost all of Latin America are more highly educated now than 1970s Europe and poorer than it.

Brazil's economic growth has been between 5% and 10% since the 1970s. That's pretty respectable. So how can you claim which is the causation?

> I said that education was a consequence of economic growth, not vice versa.

> The most obvious example of economic growth not being associated with education is post Deng Xiaoping China. The huge majority had primary school education at best and the economy just kept growing and growing.

From your own source, China also has a greater proportion of the populace in third level education than France did in 1970. In fact, the chart for China looks very similar to Brazil. And with both countries "the economy just kept growing and growing."

> If you do a regression of changes in education over time versus changes in economic growth there is no trend.

Source? Where can we find that analysis?

> That Brazil is not competing with 1970s France is irrelevant to my claim. Education is a consequence rather than a cause of growth.

You don't have to look at relative education levels to understand if a competitive advantage in education leads to growth? It would be naive to claim any change in education will result in economic growth. So hopefully what we are talking about here is changes in education that lead to one country being ahead in education in some qualitative measures. At which point you would be able to understand whether or not being ahead of another country in education results in growth.

This sounds plausible and if I had to hazard a guess as to why efforts at reform have failed, I'd say it's because people who haven't thought very much about the goals of education have an idea in their heads of what education should look like and it is our current system. I think parents and politicians have a lot of control over the system and just like the "butts-in-seats" theory of business management, a lot of people think if kids aren't doing copious amounts of homework, they're not learning anything.

We're homeschooling our kids and we track their progress compared to the public school curriculum closely, and we do remarkably little that looks like formal education. The kids are easily on schedule with everything, a year or more ahead of the curriculum benchmarks, but people see what we do, and then ask when we're going to start teaching them stuff.

This was exactly my experience too! I wanted to separate out the game narrative from the actual history when I played something like the campaigns in Age of Empires II, and it drove a ton of history reading.

I'd like to see simulation-based games as a supplement to traditional learning or apprenticeship.

There are a lot of XYZ Mechanic Simulator games which I think have potential to be effective learning tools. They won't teach you muscle memory, but a good one can distill a lot of experience into a shorter timeframe than normal. A mechanic simulator can teach you engine diagnosis and repair quickly because you can fast-forward the slow, mundane parts. You can also pace the 'lessons' for better retention, building incrementally on concepts.

We've already seen this be successful in aviation and racing.

On that vein, I've been wishing for a Zachtronics-style game that teaches electronics, starting with LEDs and resistors and moving on to more complex circuits.

> From your own source, China also has a greater proportion of the populace in third level education than France did in 1970. In fact, the chart for China looks very similar to Brazil.

Yes, China got rich so it started spending money on education. That’s my point. An educated populace is a consequence of a rich one, not a cause.

> Does Schooling Cause Growth or the Other Way Around?

> Barro (1991) and others find that growth and schooling are highly correlated across countries, with each additional year of 1960 enrollment associated with about .6% per year faster growth in per capita GDP from 1960 to 1990. In a model with finite-lived individuals who choose schooling, schooling can influence growth, but also faster technology-driven growth can induce more schooling by raising the effective rate of return on investment in schooling. We consider a variety of evidence to determine the strength of these channels, with two main findings. First, faster-growing countries have at most modestly flatter cross-sectional experience-earnings profiles, consistent with a minority role for the channel from schooling to growth. Second, we calibrate the model using evidence from the labor literature and employ UNESCO attainment data to construct schooling going back well before 1960.

> We find the channel from schooling to growth to be too weak to generate even half of Barro's coefficient under a range of plausible parameter values. The reverse channel from expected growth to schooling, in contrast, is capable of explaining the empirical relationship. We conclude that the evidence favors a dominant role for the reverse channel from growth to schooling.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5194368_Does_School...