
What You Are Missing
There are more than four thousand charter schools in the United States, but there’s only one that tries to mimic a video game. At Quest to Learn, which serves sixth through twelfth graders in New York City, students get little of traditional homework, lectures, studying, or even grades. Instead, they engage in goal-oriented “missions,” supposedly accumulating knowledge and skills across disciplines while, say, pretending to be an adviser to the Spartan government during the Peloponnesian War. As in a video game, they progress at more or less their own pace, and there’s never anything as definitive