How Tranai instant recall system would affect education level.

I may need to explain how the instant recall system works on Tranai (it is described in this book). Basically, every government official must wear a special collar (which can't be removed while the person holds an office), and there are special booths all around the planet. The collars contain a few grams of explosive and a radio detonator and in the booths there are buttons with officials' names. If a citizen is dissatisfied with the official's work, he can come to a booth and press the corresponding button, and, once a certain threshold is met...

Of course, the real system doesn't have to so brutal. Instead of the explosive decapitation, just recalling the official should be enough. There is, however, an obvious problem with such a system: it doesn't allow unpopular decisions to be made. Really, it isn't possible to satisfy absolutely everyone, so every political decision is necessarily a compromise of sorts -- and that is probably the major reason people hate politicians: every decision that is beneficial to one group is not so beneficial to another, and virtually everyone ends up in one of latter groups. Politician just have to try to satisfy everyone, which gives them an appearance of lying hypocrites (or you have to be a hypocrite to become a politician, doesn't really matter what is the cause and what is the effect here.)

This necessity of "balance" makes uneducated populace more attractive to governments: people who don't think critically can be cheated easily, so governments may want to decrease the quality of public education. Which creates a vicious positive feedback: the generation raised with worse education produces even worse rulers (of all levels, from city district officials to presidents/prime ministers), who, in turn, worsen the public education system even further.

Now, the instant recall system could start the cycle in the opposite direction: more educated people will more likely accept unpopular, but necessary decisions, so the government would be more interested in increasing the education level of the population. And more educated people will produce smarter rulers, who will improve the education even further.

Of course, this will work best if people live and occupy an office long enough so that their efforts in the area of educating new citizens could be statistically evident while they're still in office.

Video games for learning

It's being discussed whether computer games are useful for teaching children things, but I think the emphasis is on the wrong type of things intended to be taught. It seems the effort is mostly focused on maths and natural sciences, which is unfortunate because learning those through games substitutes the actual understanding of the world with a collection of random facts. True, memorizing the multiplication table might be a little boring, but good old birching can heal that!

There is, I think, a very valid application of video games: learning a foreign language. And it shouldn't be some silly "help Froggy to cross the road by pressing the right letter key" -- or whatever variation of Hangman there is. No, just take an actual game that is interesting to play, the only restriction is that the game has to be of the Quest/Adventure type (Quake won't work). Just let the children play those games for as long as they want (within reasonable limits).

Something is missing, huh? Yes, one more thing: the game has to be in the language that is to be learned... And a dictionary may come in handy, too ;)

/I know this works from personal experience.
//M-m-m-m, Space Quest!