Pokemon GO vs School

This is the post I’ve been waiting for since I downloaded Pokemon Go. I was fully expecting to hate it (the original game never appealed to me as a kid) so I was really surprised at how much fun it was to play.

My family is full of academics, so the first thing that came to mind is that in about a year or so there will be tons of publications about the health effects of PG. Increased levels of walking, community, social interaction etc. But honestly, I can’t wait to see how the narrative around video games changes. The baby boomer/Gen X obsession with the evils of screen time always seemed kind of weird to me – especially lumping all screens into one category.

Colleges are already adapting. The other day a neighbor told me that she got a recruitment letter for her son that included a blurb about how they’ll have Pokemon lures throughout the campus tour! I laughed out loud.

As usual, this is an interesting argument, with which I disagree.

Some here recall my prior posts, and know my son will be going to school in the fall after homeschooling with me for the past six years.

I am not convinced that he will benefit academically from school. He will continue to study science elsewhere, probably still do math mostly with me, the locus of his academic learning will remain at home… if it were just academics, I’d recommend he not go. We could do more.

He’s going back to school in large part for social reasons. Yes, I am aware that, during class, one typically doesn’t have much in the way of conversations – I recall that from my youth. And one sits at lot (as one typically does during reading, writing, and figuring, wherever that is done). But when my son went for a shadow day in the spring he was energized by the social interaction he had there. He enjoys participating in classes, he enjoys helping other students, enjoys interacting with teachers, and he especially enjoyed viola sectionals (this school’s orchestra program is so extensive that there are over 20 violas in just one of the four orchestras). Group work is a large part of school now, and he enjoys that sort of thing too.

I know that all children develop differently – I have two who are doing so. At this point, at twelve, my son is experiencing a hunger for a larger social group, or perhaps a drive to develop the leadership (and followership) skills a person can grow only as part of a larger social group. Given his judgmental predilections, a rigid, rule-bound environment is likely a good place for him to pursue this, and I expect he will like it.

I’d be interested to strap a pedometer to my son and see how far he really walks as part of school. It’ll be about three miles every day just walking to and from the train on both ends. There’ll be a bit of bolting up and down the hallways (I think the sitting in one place part usually goes away after elementary school – in high school you move from classroom to classroom), and a gym class or two. He participates in musical theater year-round, and there’s a fair bit of dancing in that. He’ll have extra walking on days he’ll walk from school to the conservatory, or take the train to the science institute. All in all, it’ll be a reasonable amount of daily exercise, even without participating in sports.

I can’t deny that I find something cool about the latest Pokemon concept – I think it’s the best Pokecrud yet – but my aversion to the whole Pokeverse means I’ll never download it. I grew up before Reagan smashed the regulations about toy advertising, and I always felt disgusted by cartoon shows that were nothing but toy promotions in disguise. Pokemon, which came out after I finished college, struck me as belonging to the ilk of He-Man, Transformers, etc. It was created as an on-air promotion of game boy games, and has continued as a merchandising project / show in multiple generations. I would never watch it when I could watch far better cartoons, like Animaniacs or Phineas and Ferb.

It is remarkable how much useless crap kids can memorize in the service of Pokemon. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if kids memorized ancient history or rhetorical tropes with the same vigor. It’s no more useless than sports statistics, I guess. Fantasy Football is like Pokemon for fat old men. I guess it would be better if they had to walk down to the park to “catch” Cam Newton for their “teams.”

My son was excited by the idea – he digs the Pokeverse – but he doesn’t have a smart phone because I didn’t get him one, so he can’t play it. A flip phone serves for emergencies, tracks his location, and lets him stay in the here-and-now; it’s useless for social media or games, which I see as a feature. He’s got enough to do without adding another ubiquitous fascination / distraction. Missing out on a social phenomenon? It’s fine; there’ll be another one next year.

So for the comparison of school vs Pokemon Go? I guess there could be a kid for whom the latter is actually better… maybe a kid for whom book-learning is a wash, a kid who can’t learn anything unless he’s moving, a kid who will derive long-term benefit from social networking based on trivialities, a kid who would otherwise only sit on the couch playing video games and getting fatter and weaker, a kid who doesn’t have a future involving academic progress, and is better off skipping all that and going straight to menial labor, enlivened by fantasy preoccupations.

But that’s not my kid.