# While we chase scores on the board, education's deeper crisis remian unsolved ## Kahoot sells dopamine, not knowledge Kahoot is not an education company. The real product is **emotional stimulation**—through **competition**, **social validation**, and **instant feedback loops**. Each quiz round is a mini-casino with flashing lights and leaderboards. Human motivation is not driven by knowledge per se but by _reward anticipation_. Kahoot weaponizes this through real-time, low-stakes gamification. It hijacks the same brain systems exploited by TikTok and slot machines—but cloaked in the moral authority of “education.” ### Superficial Engagement ≠ Deep Learning Kahoot does not enhance understanding. It masks shallow comprehension with momentary excitement. - Students may remember who won the quiz, not what was asked. - It incentivizes speed over reflection, competition over collaboration. ## Kahoot reflects the failure of our education. Kahoot thrives only because schools are boring. Its entire value is parasitic: it makes an otherwise dead classroom tolerable for 5 minutes. If classrooms become more project-based, discussion-based, or self-directed, Kahoot’s entire raison d’être collapses. Kahoot cannot exist in an intrinsically engaging educational system. Teachers aren’t competing with ignorance—they’re competing with TikTok, YouTube, group chats, and the growing impatience of overstimulated students. Kahoot offers a form of synthetic engagement: it looks like attention, but it’s actually spectacle. This reveals critical failures of institutional education: - It cannot sustain voluntary attention through content alone. - It relies on external scaffolds (games, rewards, grades, fear) to hold attention in place. Kahoot is a painkiller, not a cure. It's treating the symptom, not the disease. ## Kahoot helps education avoid the failure. Students are disengaged -- why? Are they just lazy? Or is that what we’re teaching—and how we’re teaching it—has no resonance with their reality? Kahoot offers a compelling distraction, but it never addresses the core disillusionment: - Why am I learning this? - How is this relevant? - What is all this for, if not for the awards & podium? By offering a sugar rush instead of a real meal, Kahoot helps educators avoid the existential questions that should haunt any honest pedagogue. > Kahoot succeeded **not because it changed education**, but because it allowed education to avoid changing. Rather than rethinking assessment, motivation, or purpose, schools slap a layer of interactivity over a stagnant model. This is educational stagnation with a cosmetic upgrade. ![[Kahoot, and the failure of education.png]] Kahoot’s success is not a celebration. It is a symptom of educational failure—a bright, blinking distraction in a system that has forgotten how to make learning feel alive. - If students need a game to stay awake, your pedagogy is dead. - If teachers need a leaderboard to feel effective, your system is sick. - If schools adopt tools to signal innovation, while their curriculum stays inert, you are witnessing decay beneath a veneer of progress. The future of learning does not lie in better quiz games. It lies in: - Restoring meaning and purpose to what we teach. - Replacing gamification with genuine curiosity and engagement. - Rediscovering learning as a self-directed act, not an externally incentivized performance. Until then, Kahoot will thrive—not because it solves education, but because it lets us avoid the truth: > We are entertaining our way through a crisis of meaning.