In a recap of SXSW 2011, The Guardian posts this little snippet of Seth Priebatsch’s SXSW keynote, regarding the educational system:

the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you’ve failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score?

– SXSW 2011: The internet is over

Except I can’t help but think that this is a completely naive point of view. Yes, I agree that the educational system is broken, and this might be a step in the right direction, but simply replacing grades with experience points doesn’t solve the problem of failing students. Kids who have no interest in education aren’t going to change their minds just because it’s now a game. The idea of “I don’t need school” isn’t going to be solved by making it a game they could win.

Some people will inevitably not want to play. It’s the nature of people. In fact, I’d almost think more kids would be uninterested in “playing” the game of school. Priebatsch used the idea of experience points like you’d earn in World of Warcraft – wouldn’t you be so much more interested in learning math if you got to end up as a Level 20 Paladin of Math? Uh, no. No, I certainly wouldn’t have. That would have turned me off of math entirely (not that I particularly loved it in the first place in high school).

For the kids who are failing in school, it’s not going to be enough to just make it a game and assume that all people want to play it. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play, and we already see the problem of kids not wanting to play the game of school. How would replacing letter grades with experience points solve the issue for those students?