I don't have my hand in an actual classroom, unless you count the college courses I've written supporting software for. And I don't expect to: from the reports I've gotten from those teachers I admire, the sheer bureaucracy would drive me mad. Political change is slow and frustrating, and I wouldn't even know where to try to drive it.
Instead, I aim to make compelling games that effectively teach these high-level skills, whether those games are straight-up video games, or carefully-constructed ARGs, or board games, or whatever odd mashup of these is required. If you look at what's written by anyone who takes game design seriously, you read about trees of player mastery, management of motivation, and interaction that varies based on player interest. In particular, game designers talk about the careful design of incentive systems.
I suspect this is exactly what needs attention in education.
So, I want to make these games for a few reasons:
These are lofty and difficult goals. If I'm to work towards these in any serious way, I should first attain some scholarship. (Yes, much can be learned by jumping in feet first and trying things. But when other people are part of your feedback loop, it's nice to know, say, what the embarrassing mistakes are.) I have some sense of what to read regarding game design; I had no real sense of what to read regarding education. Thus, this thread.
I want to learn what's well-understood about education. I expect to launch myself into some endeavors in teaching the first few levels of epistemic and instrumental rationality - ie., critical thinking and problem solving. I'm a little suspicious, though, of the scattered educational texts that I've so far read. In particular, education seems like a field where it's easy to have motivated thoughts, and hard to gather good data.
With my background (Math and CS) I'm a little at sea in educational literature. Does anyone know of good, reductionist-grade or evidential-grade, introductory texts in education?