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FlumphPaladin
2015-07-22, 08:12 AM
I know the educational value of gaming has been debated to death before, but hopefully this is a different, perhaps unexplored take on the subject.

Having recently learned about classical education, I've come to wonder whether the classical trivium--grammar, rhetoric, and logic--is really taught in meaningful ways in schools today. While grammar is covered in terms of reading comprehension, and rhetoric is, I guess, the point of the five-paragraph essay, I genuinely can't say that I was taught, in school or elsewhere, how to think. I wasn't really taught logic, and as a result, I am continually distressed to find my ideas and beliefs full of fallacies, narrowmindedness, and contradictions. If the trivium was once considered to be the essential foundation of education (being a foundation of critical thinking), why is it so impoverished now? If it isn't, did I just miss the boat?

My question is whether it could be useful to explore the trivium and critical thinking through gaming, encouraging players to learn new words, describe and understand what's going on, think rationally and with an open mind, and form and defend ideas. If they're already learning this in school and I did just miss out on it, then this could be good practice to internalize the process. And of course, the most important part of all this is whether it can be done while still being fun.

What do you think? Is this possible, or is it in danger of becoming an after-school special?

BWR
2015-07-22, 08:42 AM
In my experience, it is hardly taught. We were taught some very basic rules about Norwegian grammar (and I'm told even this has disappeared from the curriculum), and of course a bit more in German classes but I can't recall anything being said about English grammar (but already knowing it better than the teachers I didn't pay much attention in class so I may have missed it). It wasn't actually until university that I got any real education in grammar of Germanic languages, and that was because of my choice of studies.
Rhetoric and logic...eh, I suppose you could say we had some training in the numerous 'write an essay about X' but we weren't given much in the way of actual education in how to do these things. The prevailing reasoning from the ministry was, I believe, practice makes perfect but they kind of vague what to practice. Some teachers did make a minor effort but it was not great. I had one good teacher in high school who really did try to teach us how to write a proper essay and I'm not sure if most of my classmates appreciated her efforts.
I spoke to one Australian who said they had not even the slightest trace of grammar education in school so even concepts like nouns and verbs were a bit new to her when they came up in class. I can't help but feel she was pulling my leg on the matter but she seemed earnest.

Regarding the second bit, I do think you run the risk of, as you say, becoming an afterschool special. There is far more to grammar than just learning new words and while you may possibly include the odd language puzzle (e.g. use the correct form of the verb in this phrase to pass) it will more likely be a chore than fun, and then you've missed the point of gaming. Turning games into a debate club might work, and I have personally had many IC debates in various games which have been varying degrees of fun, but in most of these cases you also have mechanics to back it up. Once you have that, actual logic or rhetoric becomes reduced to mechanics and you won't learn anything. If you add logic puzzles they might be fun but then you've basically added mini-games to the game which aren't really relevant to the characters, stories or setting.

You can very definitely have elements of these things in games but making them a major component and especially a learning experience is going to be very difficult without losing the focus of the game and (most importantly keeping it fun.

MrStabby
2015-07-22, 09:05 AM
I also think that gaming can be good for this but ensuring that it remains fun is pretty tricky. Some elements of this are more appropriate than others to cover.

Grammar I would ignore. Unless you are running a campaign where players actually have to learn languages it seems a bit artificial, and if they do it doesn't seem like much fun.

Rhetoric is easier and you can build on that with the right group. In a game like D&D I would drop the CHA stat (merge its remaining abilities into Wisdom) and make all persuasion be done in character. To work you need an evenly matched group of players so one doesn't dominate. Get people thinking about not just what to say, but how to say it, when to say it and to whom to say it. It is harder to DM as the DM needs to let the players see the character of their audience and to have the backstory needed to give a real emotional response to the message.

Logic can also work - either formal or informal. Deductive reasoning to solve puzzles or to deduce what happened can easily be part of a game and can certainly be made fun. Inductive reasoning can also work - let people see patterns forming and each encounter slowly adds more evidence. Make information have a big impact on strategy and let people use what they deduce to be more effective characters. Much like I suggested with CHA you could get rid of INT and make the characters role-play that (and likewise you would want a set of equally smart players to make this work/be fun).

FlumphPaladin
2015-07-22, 09:54 AM
Norwegian grammar
Du er norsk, da? Jeg lærer bokmål på Duolingo!


Unless you are running a campaign where players actually have to learn languages it seems a bit artificial, and if they do it doesn't seem like much fun.
Agreed; perhaps "grammar" doesn't convey the right idea, and apart from the occasional riddle, word puzzle, or literalistic genie, will probably be less than fun. I think language-comprehension is more or less built into pen-and-paper RPGs, what with the amount of reading required to understand the rules and backstory, and the fact that you have to describe your character's actions and speak their dialogue as well.

Dropping CHA and INT... on one hand, I always thought that AD&D 2e's alternative to NWP's, where the player just uses what he knows about, to be a great idea. On the other, my old DM tried something like that with Diplomacy and Gather Information once, and I never made any check because of it. That might conflict with people who want to roleplay as something they're not, such as past-me wanting to be a smooth character (I've since embraced my awkwardness). Maybe modifiers, or a generic "what do you want to say" being asked prior to the roll?

It appears that for something like this to work, it really does need to be more about applying the results of this sort of knowledge, rather than imparting it. This is starting to sound more like a style of DMing than anything else.

Segev
2015-07-22, 12:54 PM
If I ramble off into a bit of a political screed at some point, I apologize; it's because I think some of the degredation of our educational standards is deliberate, part of a design to indoctrinate with propaganda more than to teach useful skills (and to deliberately AVOID logic and analysis of rhetoric to identify logical fallacies).

However, what I think you're really looking for, if you want to try eductation in critical thinking through RPGs, is the Socratic Method. When done well, it's actually an extremely powerful tool for teaching, because it forces the student to come up with the reasoning, himself, and to arrive at his own conclusions. It requires a sound foundation in logical reasoning, and if coupled with an encouragement to debate, can help teach rhetoric through simple mechanism of making persuasive, clear arguments important.

Sadly, it's usually done poorly, particularly as depicted in movies about college wherein the method is theoretically practiced. It is not EASY to do well, because as the teacher, one assumes one knows the answer and the temptation is simply to give it after a while. Done poorly, it is often an excuse for a know-it-all professor to prove to his students how much smarter than they are he is. Severus Snape engages in a particularly egregious example of it the first Potions class Harry is in when he asks about things the class seriously could not be expected to know without having memorized their entire books, only to then give the answer with a sneer.

The concept behind it is that you ask what are, to you as the teacher, rhetorical questions. Feigning ignorance at first, you ask questions designed to get people to recall knowledge, or to look it up, and to apply logical analysis to come up with answers. You often play the Devil's Advocate, debating with them by finding the flaws you know are in their reasoning, or by using arguments you know to be flawed but which seem to undermine it. This is used to either get them to find ways to defend their correct analyses with more sound logic and facts, or to independently recognize the flaws in their own arguments.

When you are trying to get them to see the flaws in their own position, rather than trying to get them to shore up a correct one, the questions usually take on a greater feigned innocence. In a somewhat manipulative fashion, the only time you ask argumentative questions is when you want the student to shore up and reaffirm his belief, unless he has so blatant a flaw in his logic that the only way to dismantle it is with a point-blank broadside. If you want to help him see why his conclusions are bad, you instead ask questions that lead to obvious contradictions while phrasing them as clarifying. This is because people get defensive easily, and the whole purpose of the Socratic method is to help them come to the conclusion on their own, so they accept and internalize it as their own idea.

Not only is this rhetorically powerful, but it really does help with understanding, because reacing an idea on your own, rather than merely accepting it from another, means you can find your way to it from base principles again; you don't find yourself with a belief or thought that, under examination, seems without foundation, because you've already examined it and built its foundations in your own mind.

The other upside of this method of teaching is that, while it CAN be used to indoctrinate with baseless beliefs, it's actually harder because you can't always guarantee that the student will draw the same conclusions you do. You're never spelling them out. (That's the other thing that is a giveaway that it's being done poorly: after sneering at the students for not knowing the answer, the Socratic method is abandoned for a more lecturing tone to tell them the right way to think about it. While sometimes necessary, the badly-done Socratic professor will take delight in this opportunity to prove his superior intellect, where the professor doing it correctly will feel it a failure when he has to because it means he's not yet taught his students how to think for themselves.)


The reason I say this is what RPGs lend themselves to is because you can set up the situation from base principles, and then let the players loose in it. Your NPCs can be strawmen or Socratic questioners, and the very world itself is simply asking "what will you do with what you see?"

Do expect lots of questions about how the world works; that's the whole point. Do expect players to demand consistency; without it, you cannot pull this off. Do not allow yourself to paste Aesops across the setting or the plot arcs; you are not, ultimately, there to spell out a conclusion to them. Instead, come up with the situation and scenario, and let it play itself out however it will. Sometimes, you may discover that your players found a solution you didn't expect. Above all, try to be consistent and honest with yourself about the character of your NPCs. This will be crucial to any sort of effort to guide the players in drawing conclusions based on the base principles of your world.

snowblizz
2015-07-22, 01:33 PM
Having recently learned about classical education, I've come to wonder whether the classical trivium--grammar, rhetoric, and logic--is really taught in meaningful ways in schools today.
As someone who has benefited from what is world-wide considered the best public school system evvar!!1!!one!, have a teacher mother and watched with curious detachment as a certain westerly neighbouring country have dismantled their public schools I'll chime in. As to the first, increasingly they do not. We definitely did grammar, and I'd say logic also, if nothing else in mathematics, rethoric I'm a bit unsure of, although I have an slight memory of something like that at least from secondary school. I remember having to argue for equal adoption rights, and I even managed to convince one person to change their mind. That was pretty cool, which is why I kinda remember it.
As to the second my, admittedly, unscientific observation of that is that it quite simply is, because. Because it is, and was, the classical type and way of education it has come to be viewed as archaic and in a sense elitist. So beginning in the 70s and going up to currently there has been a fairly strong emphasis on making school "fun", and teaching more about (supposedly) learning at the expense of memorising facts and unfortunately actually learning anything. Mindless memorising of facts has been inexorably linked to the other aspects of classical education, so in a sense the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

Red Fel
2015-07-22, 02:23 PM
... Dungeons (http://dresdencodak.com/2006/12/03/dungeons-and-discourse/) and Discourse (http://dresdencodak.com/2009/01/27/advanced-dungeons-and-discourse/), the Game (http://dndis.wikidot.com/)?

Segev
2015-07-22, 02:54 PM
As someone who has benefited from what is world-wide considered the best public school system evvar!!1!!one!, have a teacher mother and watched with curious detachment as a certain westerly neighbouring country have dismantled their public schools I'll chime in. As to the first, increasingly they do not. We definitely did grammar, and I'd say logic also, if nothing else in mathematics, rethoric I'm a bit unsure of, although I have an slight memory of something like that at least from secondary school. I remember having to argue for equal adoption rights, and I even managed to convince one person to change their mind. That was pretty cool, which is why I kinda remember it.
As to the second my, admittedly, unscientific observation of that is that it quite simply is, because. Because it is, and was, the classical type and way of education it has come to be viewed as archaic and in a sense elitist. So beginning in the 70s and going up to currently there has been a fairly strong emphasis on making school "fun", and teaching more about (supposedly) learning at the expense of memorising facts and unfortunately actually learning anything. Mindless memorising of facts has been inexorably linked to the other aspects of classical education, so in a sense the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

Actual education is difficult, leads to critical thinking, and runs counter to certain religious movements that won't admit they're religions (pretending instead to be "settled science" which you're a heret--er, "stupid" if you don't believe unquestioningly) that are indoctrinated in schools.

It's a lot easier to spoon-feed goodthink and fun and claim you know so much better than centuries of experience before you how to impart knowledge and thinking skills, especially if you can rewrite and simplify tests to "prove" you're teaching better. Real world? Pff, it doesn't fit the models, so ignore it.

BWR
2015-07-22, 05:09 PM
Du er norsk, da? Jeg lærer bokmål på Duolingo!

Indeed I am. Why Norwegian, of all languages?
(not that I particularly mind showing off my bilingual skills but I think there's some sort of rule here against it. Or maybe just some butt-huirt posters the first time I tried it)

FlumphPaladin
2015-07-22, 05:57 PM
I believe there is a policy against excessive foreign language usage.

As to why Norwegian... I'm not entirely sure! I guess I'm kind of a fan of Scandinavian culture (and metal! \m/), and I gather that Norwegian makes it easier to understand Danish and Swedish than either of those make the others.

BWR
2015-07-23, 09:52 AM
I believe there is a policy against excessive foreign language usage.

As to why Norwegian... I'm not entirely sure! I guess I'm kind of a fan of Scandinavian culture (and metal! \m/), and I gather that Norwegian makes it easier to understand Danish and Swedish than either of those make the others.

That may be true, but I think it has less to do with being a sort of linguistic middle ground (which it is, to a degree) and more to do with Norwegians generally being less inclined to dub stuff and more inclined to watch the TV channels of our neighbors (which we got on cable or satellite alongside the Norwegian ones). Simply, my generation grew up watching a lot of Swedish shows (like the amazing adaptations of Lindgren's Emil i Lønneberga (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDoPREqtBKk) and Pippi Langstrump (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZtMNCBWOUo)).
It's much the same reason why Scandinavians in general are pretty good in English. And while Norwegians may understand Danish better than Swedes, no one understands Danish well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk).

FlumphPaladin
2015-07-23, 10:29 AM
It's a lot easier to spoon-feed goodthink and fun and claim you know so much better than centuries of experience before you how to impart knowledge and thinking skills, especially if you can rewrite and simplify tests to "prove" you're teaching better. Real world? Pff, it doesn't fit the models, so ignore it.

Pretty much, and then pretend to teach critical thinking in an optional, upperclass-level course at the end of high school. The only time I've seen people civilly and rationally argue ideas has been in an RPG (and that only in the first session, before a pecking order was established among the players... I was a bad DM). Has anyone encouraged this kind of debate in-game, like about deciding where to take the MacGuffin, or the classic "what do we do with the goblin babies?"


no one understands Danish well.
I forget who it was, but I once heard someone describe Danish as "Norwegian as spoken by space aliens."

BWR
2015-07-23, 10:59 AM
I forget who it was, but I once heard someone describe Danish as "Norwegian as spoken by space aliens."

In my father's day it was "Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth". [note that potatoes he grew up eating were only a couple inches across]

Endarire
2015-07-26, 11:01 PM
Grammar, spelling, flow, and logic ('trivium' as you put it) was taught to me in school. Logic was primarily from my geometry teacher in 10th grade (1999-2000) for defending my arguments. Others were from English classes. I grew up around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA (in West Allis, techncially) where this stuff was taught. However, I owe my success at these courses to two main factors:

1: My mother was (and still is) a librarian. She read to me nightly, often while I was taking a bath, in bed, or playing video games. I got that knowledge of spelling grammar, and flow from there. My parents and grandparents also helped me with my homework from a young age. I was playing arithmatic games on an old TI computer (circa 1983) from around age 5 (1989-1990).

2: I read. Lots. I read strategy guides (because Nintendo Hard was the standard back then). I read books and magazines and literature for entertainment. Perhaps most importantly in this area, I played lots of video games where lots of reading was involved. I learned language as a part of playing games. It wasn't until Baldur's Gate II that I really started to play them except to mess around in them. I loved my cheat codes and experimentation and if something was too hard, I would cheat to make it work.