Practice harder

I can't help but come back to the brain training computer games, it's like I'm morbidly fascinated by them. I noticed an advert for one on the tube today that said it would make you "better". It didn't even state what it would make you better at, just generically better. From the looks of things it was a game based around numeracy. Now I'm all for a bit of numeracy, and I'm well aware that it is believed that doing things like Sudoku helps stave off dementia, but I still can't help thinking this is all a bit Michael Gove. In case you're not sure what I mean, I'm referring to the incarnation of Michael Gove where he has been so far allowed to do the most damage to our society: Education Secretary. At that time, his belief was that having absolute answers for everything and making sure that your children give only those answers was the key to making them, well I can't believe he actually thought it would make them more well rounded, I guess he was hoping everyone would be more like him, rather than being turned off education entirely and dropping out of the bottom a system that had utterly failed them. 

Looking at these games though, it is easy to see how Gove thought that he was right to try and reduce the world to simple binaries of right and wrong. We are all happy to accept that our better selves can be achieved through a series of right answers, why not believe the same for our children. At what point will they realise they've been cheated, that knowing the answers will get them nothing if they don't know the right people; that wrote learning was just something to keep them distracted until they were old enough to earn a living for their employers? Maybe they'll never notice. Maybe they'll cling on to the belief that continuing to answer questions will pay off eventually, keeping themselves eternally distracted by continual testing whilst life passes them by. 

Our obsession with making ourselves 'better' through continual testing misses the point. Who wants to lie on their deathbed thinking 'well at least I answered a lot of questions correctly'? What are we actually learning from logic puzzles? It doesn't seem that we are applying any of that learned logic in evaluating their worth.