Serious Play

By Dale Mann

Only children pass easily between the parallel universes of entertainment and education. Each of these giant sectors of the economy takes more than $300 billion from the public, but they communicate mainly by pointing fingers--"Entertainment corrupts" ... "Schools have failed."

The kids are more sophisticated. Consider video games. The most popular come shrink-wrapped with 100-page game books. Experts estimate that even an adept preteen will take a hundred hours to get to the last screen. A hundred pages and a hundred hours is a curriculum. We may not like everything that video games teach, but they do teach. The stuff is a cannon. Who loads it? Who points it?

Meanwhile, schools proceed as though they were the only educators. If we would never hear "transportation planning" and think "bus schedules," why do we still hear "education" and think "schools"? That tunnel vision twists us farther away from...