OUR SCHOOL IN EYES OF GAMER GENERATION: HOW VIDEO GAMES EXPOSE DEEP PROBLEMS OF OUR EDUCATION

Abstract

From the theoretical perspective of the contemporary educational theory and didactics, there are many problems concerning our elementary and high school curriculums (within the educational system of Republic of Serbia). There is also empirical evidence that our education is outdated, ill-construed and with the problematic conception of the learning process in its core. However, those problems are rarely considered and presented from the students’ point of view. In this paper, I am approaching the problems of our educational system from that perspective. I argue that the deep flaws in our education are even more evident to the newest, so-called: gamer generation. As the argument in favour of this negative claim, I offer an analysis of the learning process within the video games insisting that it is – as a sort of Dewian conception of learning – superior to the learning process typically assumed in our school. On the basis of that analysis, I propose that students acquainted and familiar with such learning process would naturally be even more reluctant and less motivated for learning in old fashioned way still present in our school system. As for the closing and positive part of the paper, my main suggestion is that focusing school curriculums around the competences tightly connected to reasoning and discovering (and also encouraging a heuristic approach as the preferable teaching method) can make our education better in both respects: objectively and in the eyes of the students we teach.