James Paul Gee > Quotes

“Learning is a deep human need, like mating and eating, and like all such needs it is meant to be deeply pleasurable to human beings.”
― James Paul Gee, Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul: Pleasure and Learning

“Our world is now so complex, our technology and science so powerful, and our problems so global and interconnected that we have come to the limits of individual human intelligence and individual expertise.”
― James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

“An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.”
― James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

“people like stories because they are good, not because they are true.”
― James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

“School is often based not on problem solving, which perforce involves actions and goals, but on learning information, facts, and formulas that one has read about in texts or heard about in lectures. It is not surprising, then, that research has long shown that a student’s doing well in school, in terms of grades and tests, does not correlate with being able to solve problems in the areas in which the student has been taught (e.g., math, civics, physics).”
― James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

“human intelligence and creativity, today more than ever, are tied to connecting—synchronizing—people, tools, texts, digital and social media, virtual spaces, and real spaces in the right ways, in ways that make us Minds and not just minds, but also better people in a better world.”
― James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

“Global warming, environmental degradation, global flows of economic speculation and risk taking, overpopulation, global debt, new viruses, terrorism and warfare, and political polarization are killing us. Dealing with big questions takes a long-term view, cooperation, delayed gratification, and deep learning that crosses traditional silos of knowledge production. All of these are in short supply today. In the United States and much of the developed world, decisions are based on short-term interests and gain (e.g., stock prices or election cycles), as well as pandering to ignorance. Such decisions make the world worse, not better, and bring Armageddon ever closer.”
― James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

“Formal schooling tends to demand that humans use their memories the way computers do, rather than the way humans do. This, too, can make people seem stupid.”
― James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

“Here is another idea: what if human minds are not meant to think for themselves by themselves, but, rather, to integrate with tools and other people’s minds to make a mind of minds? After all a computer operates only when all its circuit boards are integrated together and communicate with each other. What if our minds are actually well made to be “plug-and-play” entities, meant to be plugged into other such entities to make an actual “smart device,” but not well made to operate all alone? What if we are meant to be parts of a networked mind and not a mind alone?”
― James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning

“We don’t come smart out of the box.”
― James Paul Gee, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning