Walking the Streets of Old Boston During the Revolutionary War: The new way to think about education

When people ask me what I think education should be, and how much money I think should be spent on it, my thoughts are not even in the same universe as the typical concerned parent.  In such discussions it quickly becomes realized that parents need a babysitting service for their child, and that is their primary concern when discussing education, so they aren’t even willing to discuss the quality of education itself.  I personally think the old top down teaching method is dead, and is obsolete entirely.  I favor one that has individual interaction with all the wonderful media tools available today and that will come to availability tomorrow over a teacher standing in front of a classroom like a dictator reeking with authority toward an uninterested class.  I touched on some of these changes coming to education in my article on School Choice which can be reviewed by Clicking Here.

I recently found myself inspired by playing an MMO video game called The Old Republic in how the power of gaming and story driven content provided a context to how the future of education might take advantage.  After spending roughly 300 hours playing the story portion of that game with my wife I am more convinced than ever that it is in that forum that education might best be stimulated.   Now, under my daughter’s guidance and continued coaxing, I am playing a game on Xbox called Assassin’s Creed III which I previewed here a bit, CLICK FOR REVIEW, and I am staggered by the results of that effort.  Assassin’s Creed III is a visually stimulating game that is a fictional story set during the Revolutionary War taking some liberties with the time period and involves a war between a group of Templers and Assassins that extends for millenniums of human history.  It has some science fiction elements, mystery, drama, action, and some sentimental romance that makes it a compelling story—but more than that I found it educationally thought-provoking.

I more heavily than ever support the Tea Party efforts of my friends in the Liberty Movement and there have been some intense discussions of late over beer, chicken wings, and flat screen televisions in dark corners of dank local pubs that have reminded me of how the Liberty Movement started in Boston during the years of 1750 to 1773.  I see the same thing happening once again in America in these dark corners under hushed voices.  Being a lover of Alan Eckert novels especially The Frontiersman, and Wilderness Empire which cover American development from 1720 through the early 1800’s from the East Coast to Illinois I have a love of information that covers that era.  To date only The Last of the Mohicans really jumped into this time period successfully as Walt Disney attempted on several occasions to tell stories from the period without coming out like stale bread.    The period of 1680 to about 1840 in America is one of the most violent, liberating, and exciting times in American history, yet it has been watered down by modern education to reflect through academic collectivism only the concerns of the Civil Rights debates of the 1850s to 1970s which were only the tail being wagged by the dog which began in the period of the First Great Awakening, roughly 1730 to 1770.  So it was with some excitement that I placed Assassin’s Creed III into my Xbox to play after looking at it on my book shelf for nearly 4 months unopened, as I had other tasks to attend to over that duration.

The game is fun, and it’s wonderful to cut the heads off bad guys and do all the usual video game antics that make them so popular with young people.  But Assassin’s Creed is more than just fun—it is deeply educational, and places the video game player in the sights, sounds, and politics of 1750 – 1773 America very accurately, much more than I anticipated.  Within the first 15 hours of game play I took a journey from England to American aboard a four masted galleon that took 73 days.  Life on the ship was brutally realistic, and even though I have read for years about such journeys, having the ability to walk around a ship, sleep, look-out across the water, talk to people working on the vessel and doing simple chores made the journey very real for me and gave me an appreciation for these boats and their tribulations that I have not received upon viewing actual replicas in port at Jamestown and other such places.  In Assassin’s Creed III I have had the opportunity to walk the streets of Boston as they might have looked at the time and engaged in meetings in those same dimly lit taverns which reminded me very much of my present reality.  I have met and interacted with Ben Franklin, William Johnston, George Washington, and Sam Adams just to name a few.  I have found myself just walking around the streets aimlessly looking at all the street vendors, the ship yards, and various businesses in amazement.  They have done in Assassin’s Creed what Walt Disney attempted to do with his Frontier Land in Disney World, which is recreate Old Boston with as much accuracy possible so that the essence of it would not be lost to time.

To get an idea of where Lexington is in relation to Boston and how the terrain outside of Old Boston might have looked to neighboring Native American tribes has been nothing short of stunning.  The Native Americans speak in their native language with subtitles needing to be read, and I found that after a little while I was starting to understand some of the words in context to the situations without reading the subtitles.  I could literally go on and on about the quality of Assassin’s Creed as a video game.  It is an example of exception that has set a new high bar for video game development.

Yet I could not stop thinking that more kids have probably learned more about American history after playing Assassin’s Creed for 40 or 50 hours than they have in all their years of public education history classes—which makes the video game far more superior as an education tool than a stagnant teacher standing in front of a class writing on a chalk board.  Assassin’s Creed would be a fun game if killing wasn’t even involved, but rather just interacting with the Founding Fathers and watching the slow gradual rebellion fester up against the English over a twenty year period.  It is one thing to read about the occupation of British troops in Boston in 1770, but it is another to watch them patrolling the city and shoving you out-of-the-way if you walk in front of their formation to exert their authority, like what happens in Assassin’s Creed.   I have caught myself saying ahhh, haaaa many times as things I’ve read in different books over the last thirty years came together for me in the video game where I suddenly had visual reference to tie it all together.  The detail is immaculate, even down to the mechanics of riding horses as they splash about on a muddy street from a recent rain.

For me the beauty of the game is in the ships.  Assassin’s Creed III allows me to climb aboard the kind of ships I have built and used in strategic combat CLICK TO REVIEW, and walk the decks, hoist the sails, and steer accurately on the open sea.  In reality those old ships were boring, but Assassin’s Creed makes them realistically boring to the level of excitement if that makes any sense.  The graphics engine for the ship to ship combat in Assassin’s Creed III is so deliciously good, with water looking photo realistic and the ships pitching to and fro so authentically that Assassin’s Creed 4 is going to expand on their ship development with a pirate adventure in the next edition—which for me is equitable to the most ecstatic experience imaginable.  Aside from the Revolutionary Period in America, the Golden Age of Pirates is among my favorites in history, and my daughter knew it when she obtained the leaked news from Ubisoft sending me a text, “DAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE NEW ASSASSIN’S CREED GAME IS CALLED THE BLACK FLAG!!!!!!!!!!!!  IT’S ABOUT PIRATES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Being a history buff, I love to interact with these three-dimensional environments that modern video games afford.  They complement my reading in a way that allows a very detailed picture to be painted in my mind, and connects many historical dots obtained from multiple sources.  The games are made for the purposes of entertainment, but it is staggering to consider how effective they could be if they took themselves seriously as educational tools.  As I examine the effectiveness of Assassin’s Creed III next to the stagnant education methods of even the best schools, it is obvious that public education is well down the wrong path, and they refuse to analyze their position in favor of something better.  Not being a gambler I would bet everything that most young people today know more about George Washington not because of the books by Glenn Beck, or the efforts of 12 years of public education, but because they played Assassin’s Creed III during the fall of 2012 and winter of 2013 and had to speak to him, go on missions that he sent them on, and watch history take place in a computer game instead of a solitary, bored individual standing at the front of a class spewing “teacher breath,” (a combination of coffee and teeth in the first stages of gingivitis) toward an uninterested class that has no context to apply any information  to.  Video games provide that context, and to date, none better than Assassin’s Creed III.  Not even the great Sid Meyer games did so well to place a player into the streets of history to interact with its authors as equals so that truth can be grappled with.   That is the power of a video game to become an opportunity to improve education effectiveness.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com