The famous American researcher James Paul Gee is one of the active propagandists of reforms not only in the modern humanities and social sciences, but also in school education. A revolutionary and provocateur by nature, James Guy exposes the shortcomings of modern schooling in the United States in the same way that he exposes social injustice and the irresponsible attitude of society towards the use of nature's resources. Guy didn’t come to the discussion about the future of school education in the USA immediately, but already having rich experience of “revolutionary activity” in other areas: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, literacy issues in the broad sense - precisely in those areas of knowledge about a person that have given rise to recent decades serious impulses for the deep transformation of the humanities and social sciences in the West. New approaches to scientific activity in science have made the transition to a new state and a new stage of development - Postmodernism. This paradigm shift has safely passed Russia, and therefore we can look at this development as if from the outside, with a critical and evaluating look.
What is famous for James Guy
In the activities of the scientist, one can trace several stages in which he appears as if in different forms: Gi-linguist, Gi-sociologist, Gi-researcher of video games. Peru, a famous 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 studies, and in recent years he has moved on to thoughts about introducing his ideas and disseminating them to the masses.
After a fascination with 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 systemic 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, from which immigrants from countries with a more efficient school system are increasingly crowding them out.
Postmodern Games
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 the conventionality and subjectivity of people's ideas about the world, as well as on the dominant role of ideology in the development of society, or rather, the competition of various ideologies. The world of postmodernists is like a big computer video game in which simple, easily comprehensible rules apply. This simplified model of the world and society works well in various studies, however, in an attempt to use it to explain the whole variety 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.
James Guy's Ideology for High School
Unfortunately, in this article we cannot reveal the full extent of the personality of James Guy and even give an assessment of his contribution to the development of the humanities. We will try to focus only on his ideas in the field of education: the scientist has devoted his work to this field in recent years.
In essence, the ideas of Guy in education are an attempt to apply the method of discourse analysis in social practice. Confident that his scientific method allows him to successfully penetrate the true motives of people, understand the reasons for their actions and predict their life prospects, James Guy offers 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 "letter", according to the scientist, is vital for children, and not so much the ability to read or write.
Calling the school system
As a revolutionary in science, Guy expresses radical reformist ideas in the field of education. According to the scientist, a classical school system with a tradition of thousands of years does not give a person the most important literacy, namely the ability to give social reality a social assessment, to see what system principles are put into the social structure, and to understand who benefits from it (somewhere you already have you heard that?). Guy's program is a protest against brainwashing at school, preserving it as an institution for transferring 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 Guy is especially outraged that the school failed to expel religion from society, that most Americans were not able to convince that life in the Universe arose randomly from inanimate matter, and they themselves - through evolution from monkeys.
Learning Innovation by James Guy
The applied part of Guy’s linguistic and social theory is the unconventional approaches and teaching methods that he proposes for implementation in high school. Only one of these methods is video games, the study of which the researcher devotes a lot of time. James Guy proposes to abandon the conventional wisdom of video games as a means of entertainment, but instead, using the original method of a scientist, see the creator’s intention in them. In each popular video game, Guy makes some sense: one develops response and reaction speeds, the other makes it solve complex problems, including in cooperation with other participants, etc. But most importantly - video games allow a person to feel like a creator of a certain reality for a short time. According to Guy, this feeling should be transferred to the real world, to the level of communication with people, professional activities.
What does the game give?
James Guy is fascinated by video games, but not only as just a gambler, but also as a scientist. He claims that the participant in the video game acts as a project engineer who formulates hypotheses about how the 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 educational process opens up the possibility for a person to comprehend some new reality, develops the ability for systemic thinking and analysis of not only fictional, game, but also completely objective reality. The classic school curriculum does not give such a useful skill.
Assessment of James Guy's Education Ideas
Guy's views and ideas in education are very original and unconventional. They hardly fit into the modern educational system and, as the scientist himself expects, can cause great systemic opposition during 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 the modern American school, and you can not argue with that. However, a similar “fatal” diagnosis should not be made to educational systems, for example, Finland, Japan or Israel, where they find a balance between scholastic traditions and modern game elements of instruction. Therefore, systemic thinking is not always a kind of secret, occult knowledge, but a normal product of intelligence, which is developed with the right approach to learning.
The use of video games in droves requires preliminary testing and testing. It is known that children can not always easily understand where a video game ends and where life begins with real rules, laws, and quite tangible, not virtual consequences of actions. In this sense, a video game does not contribute to adaptation in objective reality. Guy speaks of the benefits that are only expected or planned, the scientist does not yet have evidence from practice. Therefore, making radical changes to established programs and institutions, we will not rush. On the other hand, the possible benefits of using video games cannot be ruled out, especially since the author of the idea himself agrees that they can be only one of the educational tools in the arsenal of high school.