“I know Kung Fu”: Educational Misadventures in the Metaverse
If you know kung fu, how do you know it? In the 1991 Hollywood film The Matrix, the plot revolves around characters who live in a visceral and dystopian reality, having awoken from the sedation of a computer-generated reality in which all other humans unknowingly exist. The main character, Neo, regularly enters into this virtual reality world, The Matrix, in order to do battle with Mr. Smith, the generic, algorithmic agent intent on reproducing the domination of the human race at the hands of a complex, networked computer. In one scene, as Neo becomes more adept at fighting the powers of computer simulation, he must fight Agent Smith. One of his team members simply uploads into his brain the capacity to engage in complex martial arts, marking the beginning of Neo’s role as ‘the one’ who will turn the tide for humanity. His brain swells in the simulation. Suddenly aware of his new capacity, Neo announces definitively, “I know kung fu”.
Why am I telling you this? Hopefully it will become apparent by the end of this blog. Thanks to the funding offered as 2023 Fellow of the British Journal of Education and Technology, I have embarked on a project to explore the educational prospects of the Metaverse. The project involves scoping existing youth-led educational practice in metaverse worlds, and then experimenting with an entirely youth-led educational encounter in the metaverse involving around 40 young people from across the planet.
Not a million miles removed from The Matrix, the Metaverse is a conceptual alternate reality landscape, defined by the use of so-called virtual, augmented or extended reality technologies. Derived from Neil Stephenson’s scifi novel Snowcrash, the term metaverse refers to a digital reality that is persistent (ie it exists even if you’re not in it), it is shared among users, it is decentralised in its organisation, and it offers users a sense of presence or visceral togetherness not offered by other digital interfaces. Metaverse-like experiences have existed for some time via closed virtual reality experiences, or in wildly popular interfaces like Second Life, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and Roblox. However, the concept of was not familiar in the broader popular imagination until, in October 2021, eternal tech wunderkind Mark Zuckerburg announced the transformation of Facebook into Meta, and subsequently hitched his wagon to the launching of a metaverse world and the technology necessary for this world to become a regular household feature. His MetaQuest2 headsets did the rounds of more affluent households the following Christmas season, but it was hardly a revolution. Slightly overshadowed by the explosion of generative AI in late 2022, the future of the metaverse remains a technological question mark, even though there is general consensus that eventually Web 3.0 or an interactive, 3D version of our existing internet is something of an inevitability. For education, the metaverse promises a truly exciting spectrum of horizon-expanding opportunities. In the metaverse, in theory, teachers and students can be transported to any place and any time, and interact in any way imaginable. Human hearts can be modelled and dissected; young people can fly into virtual classrooms represented by avatars; school trips can take place in exact mirrors of Ancient Rome or Machu Pichu or Mars, offering individuals a visceral, direct experience of the very things they are learning about. What’s not to like about such an expansion of educational horizons? On the surface this seems like a vast opportunity for education, and the EdTech landscape is littered with new start-ups and tech entrepreneurs looking to corner the market on metaverse learning.
While I am not a specialist in EdTech, the educational prospects of a new and truly open social context for education are exciting to me as an anthropologist of education. The opportunity for educational freedom in the metaverse has led me into this new and unusual world, and the prospects are exciting because the metaverse offers the means of transcending the enduring trappings of mass education as we know it. Following Ball and Collet-Sabé, I have written elsewhere about the established and compelling grounds for recognising traditional modern approaches to schooling as ‘interolerable’ and therefore in need of replacement. Drawing on Foucault and other scholars of critical pedagogy, Ball and Collet-Sabé suggest school is intolerable for the following reasons:
1) school is imagined as a self-evident and unproblematically positive and progressive mode of education;
2) school is the means by which binary discourses of the enlightenment and of modernity are reproduced (including the seemingly self-evident benefits of school vs not-school);
3) school reproduces ethnocentric discourse of universality of human experience (largely aligning with capitalist subjectivity)
4) schooling regularly reproduces the inequalities of contemporary society, in spite of laudable progressive discourse to the contrary;
5) schools reproduce a universal discourse of individualisation (currently, in the mode of neoliberal capitalism); and
6) school serves to reify particular forms of professional and technical knowledge (of teachers, psychologists, educational researchers) as superior to other forms of knowledge.
While this is an uncomfortable assessment for those of us who have spent whole careers attempting to redeem the practice of schooling to make for a more socially just world, the argument remains compelling. It is also an idea that has been percolating for at least a century (almost as long as we’ve had mass schooling), via Ferrer’s escuela moderna, or the Deschooling movement of Ilich and others in the 1970s. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith suggests, schooling is only second to genocide in terms of its powerfully negative impacts on indigenous communities. Similar critiques might be made of schooling in terms of its impacts on many minoritized and marginalised communities, including working-class communities, for whom historically schooling was explicitly not designed. This provocation begs the question: what might mass education look like if it not trapped by the conceptual straightjacket of the modern school? This is where the metaverse comes back in. Might we imagine a new kind of educational ecology in the metaverse, based not on the architectures of discipline inherent to the traditional modern school, but instead based on notions of an educational commons where all have an equal and engaged role to play in re-imagining a shared collective endeavour for the future?
Given the infinite scope of the metaverse for creating new worlds, you would hope that this would be one of the vibrant possibilities at our fingertips. However, my early misadventures in the metaverse have proven exhilarating and bemusing in equal measure. There is no question that the metaverse offers up thrilling new worlds that offer up new engagements with reality. I have flown through space, visited virtual movie theatres, concerts, and casinos, and traversed multiple social worlds, often encountering young people quick to give me a friendly dig for being a grown-up fish out of water. This is not a reality that can be usefully described in relation to a default, ‘real-world’ reality to which all other realities must be subordinated through the nomenclature of the ‘virtual’, or ‘augmented’, or ‘extended’. Presuming the inviolate nature of a ‘real’ physical or face-to-face reality would discount several decades of scholarship that suggest, compellingly, the enduring mediation of modern reality. Without resorting to the pseudo-metaphysics of The Matrix, it’s important to recognise the work of Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and many others in establishing that our reality long ago ceased to only refer to those things that are viscerally real to our experience. If an Instagram user doesn’t have their phone but watches a tree fall in the forest, this doesn’t mean that the experience is free from the unrequited desire to immortalise the falling tree in a future social media post. Similarly, there is no reason not to assume that the modes of educational interaction demanded by the pandemic – through masks, seated rows, safe distances, and rigidly agreed modes of exchange – didn’t represent a much more virtual, almost-but-not-quite embodiment of education than was experienced in the intimate, face-to-face educational interactions in Teams, Meet, or Zoom.
Rather, this might be a reality defined by velocity, by slower and faster experiences of reality that transcend various ecologies (what have been called virtual or real-reality) existing as palimpsests, laminated atop one another. There may be times when you are walking your dog, in nature, relatively alone, and in a slow engagement with reality. Later you may experience the voracious space-time compression of lurching into a work Zoom meeting with colleagues across continents and time zones, or float through a metaverse space while your haptic controls buzz away, reminding you of the textures of spacelessness.
All of this is quite exciting in terms of what it might mean for the parameters of education in the future. EdTech companies will promise that the metaverse offers a kind of accelerated experience of learning, a familiar trope of the industry. If one can transport to the ice rings of Saturn and throw some rocks around, one can suddenly surmise the nature of astronomy. This is a kind of rapacious educational reality – one where the subject of education can derive its outcomes without the hassle of the process. As in the case of Neo in The Matrix, on can simply and suddenly know kung fu without having to learn it. This is outcomes-oriented education in its purest form, the distance between intention or desire and reward made vanishingly, atomically, infinitely small. Indeed, with the incursion of generative AI, we might imagine a scenario where Neo would obviate the experience of suddenly knowing that he knows kung fu, instead accepting that an algorithmically tailored educational experience would simply predict and provide him with the skills long before he was aware that he wanted or needed them.
This all sounds very efficient. But after a few weeks of exploring metaverse worlds, and specifically searching out examples of explicit educational contexts in the metaverse, I found myself confused. Where were the handsome, other-worldy avatars effortlessly learning things they didn’t even know they needed to know? Surely, I was missing something. Surely there was more out there than what I could find? This, I truly hope, is the case, because the overwhelming majority of educational contexts in the current Mateverse offering are deeply unimaginative, and, by extraction, quite troubling. Given the opportunity of infinite spaces, worlds, and contexts for education, what have developers decided to recreate? The Victorian school. The 1950s American high school classroom. The haunted vacuum of the uninhabited university campus, given a space-age facelift.
There are a number of ways of theorising why the metaverse response to education would be so reproductive of previous educational forms. Put simply, the shadow of the modern school (and the modern university) is simply too dense and absorbing of light for other imaginings of education to become visible. EdTech developers, perhaps not surprisingly, have taken as their starting point the assumption either that a) metaverse education should emulate forms of learning already existing in schooling and university (even if the geography lesson takes you to Mars, it’s still a geography lesson); or b) that the metaverse should be bent to the yoke of learning as it already exists in schools and universities (i.e. that the best use of this infinite landscape is to reproduce the lecture theatre or rows of seats in a classroom). This reflects a number of conditions. Firstly, it reflects the conflation of education with schooling, rather than recognising that schooling is an historically anomalous and relatively peculiar mode of mass education that we can think beyond. Secondly, it essentialises specific forms of learning, assessment, pedagogy and curriculum. In one Meta advertisement, a grandma and granddaughter float around a planet to learn about its structure, only for the grandmother to ask without irony, ‘So you think you can write that paper now?’ The notion that we might so deeply enrich the learning process while retaining existing, arcane forms of assessing ‘learning’ is, frankly, absurd. Thirdly, and with reference to the work of Foucault, this approach entrenches the governmentality of existing educational systems as disciplinary technologies, anticipating docile educational subjects who are not only willing to engage in this reproduction of traditional modes of schooling but who are also thankful for the proposed benefits they will gain from the richer educational immersion that metaverse worlds will afford. In reflecting responses to the question, ‘how can the metaverse serve the school?’ we can also see how its development can be used to ever more scrupulous surveillance, as even at Machu Pichu there will be a clear and undeniable data trail of who has done what where and when, for what outcome.
At present, then, the educational prospects of the metaverse appear deeply curtailed by the discursive power of the modern school episteme to make unimaginable any other exciting and liberating alternatives. Where young people have been left at the helm, metaverse-adjacent worlds like Minecraft are filled with frivolity, irreverence, and play, with the acephalous structures of such worlds meaning that no-one is in charge, and no-one gets to decide what the point of it all is. While such worlds might therefore seem pointless, or, alternatively, appeal to those who seem gameplay as a gateway to the development of ‘soft skills’ for employability (resilience, team work, creativity – you know the drill), young people appear decidedly uninterested in the latter possibility. Where young people are creating explicitly educational encounters in metaverse spaces, a comprehensive scroll of Roblox will show that they are also quite unimaginative, reproducing high school classrooms and lunch halls, albeit more often with a focus on the informal intricacies of school life, like playground politics or how to hide from teachers.
There remains, then, much room for finding ways to re-engage this truly exciting space with educational ideas that open up, rather than closing down the horizon of educational freedom ahead of us. How might this be done? There are few existing examples of practice that move in a more empowering, enlightening direction. While not necessarily reflecting a pure kind of critical pedagogy in the vein of bell hooks or Friere, there is evidence of how the metaverse might be used for transgression and transformation. One source of widening horizons is the use of metaverse contexts to re-engage with indigenous forms of knowledge, language, and meaning making. In xxx, for example, Xxxx professor has helped to devise Biskaabiiyaang, an indigenous metaverse world. The welcome message reads as follows:
Welcome to Biskaabiiyaang: Imagine a world where Anishinaabe culture thrives, where anyone can go on adventures or sit by the fire and listen to the Elder’s teachings. A world where even the trees, plants, fish, and birds all have something to teach through quests, stories, and the language itself. Imagine a place where you can connect with others and learn how to be well in the world. Welcome to Biskaabiiyaang. By fusing virtual metaverse technologies and traditional Anishinaabe storytelling practices, Biskaabiiyaang provides inclusive, sustainable, high-quality intercultural learning materials produced by and in support of Indigenous Peoples.
While still gamified and cinematic in its style, nowhere in Biskaabiiyaang will you find a classroom, or an activity relating back to a traditional from of assessment. Instead, in this world it is nature and storytelling that form the substance of the educative experience. What other prospects could there be for this kind of re-engagement with history, education and culture? In the spirit of Arathi XXX’s framing of reparative futures and reparative history, the world of Biskaabiiyaang allows young people to ask the question what if the colonial encounter were different? What forms of education and knowledge would have persisted? This kind of anticipatory work is exactly the kind of futures-thinking that might allow young people to begin to see and shape in new ways their lived experience of the future as a reality enacted in the present. A slow, thoughtful, critical engagement with thinking about the world could be expanded through a more radical, critical, youth led proliferation of new realities. This is the truly revolutionary educational possibility of the metaverse, and something that I hope to pursue as this project, Virtual Ecologies of Learning, continues. We just need to know kung fu to make it happen.
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