Quotes from James Paul Gee

Learning is a deep human need, like mating and eating, and like all such needs it is meant to be deeply pleasurable to human beings.

Our world is now so complex, our technology and science so powerful, and our problems so global and interconnected that we have come to the limits of individual human intelligence and individual expertise.

An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.

School is often based not on problem solving, which perforce involves actions and goals, but on learning information, facts, and formulas that one has read about in texts or heard about in lectures. It is not surprising, then, that research has long shown that a student's doing well in school, in terms of grades and tests, does not correlate with being able to solve problems in the areas in which the student has been taught (e.g., math, civics, physics).

people like stories because they are good, not because they are true.

human intelligence and creativity, today more than ever, are tied to connecting—synchronizing—people, tools, texts, digital and social media, virtual spaces, and real spaces in the right ways, in ways that make us Minds and not just minds, but also better people in a better world.

Formal schooling tends to demand that humans use their memories the way computers do, rather than the way humans do. This, too, can make people seem stupid.

We don't come smart out of the box.

Learning is a deep human need, like mating and eating, and like all such needs it is meant to be deeply pleasurable to human beings.