According to tradition, Aristotle used to give his lectures while walking through the gardens of the Lyceum. There is evidence, in fact, that this peripatetic teaching technique was common, at least in a limited way, in ancient Greek society. It should never be forgotten that the ancient "schools", being in no way educational institutions in the formal, modern sense of the term, were, in fact, rather associations of wise men and scholars who united not only due to common interests, but also to share a common social life, including by participating in regular communal meals, establishing reciprocal friendships and even marital and family ties between the relatives of the different members. It would be strange, therefore, to completely discredit what tradition has bequeathed to us about Aristotle's peripatetic custom, since in ancient pedagogy there was not yet a methodologically imposed separation of the body relative to the intellect. Indeed, the ancients understood very well that the body shares the moods of the soul and vice versa, and therefore understood that the modern pedagogical technique, which requires the student to sit for hours and hours while listening to the (often sterile) lecture of the teacher, is counterintuitive. They sensed that, in order to promote a state of mind suitable for learning, it was necessary to promote a bodily state equally suitable for this, and, verily, the activity of walking stimulates the physiological operations of the body, which in turn stimulate the intellectual operations of the mind. Throughout history countless were the individuals who have judged that the best way to think deeply about a given topic was by walking, and it would be totally absurd to think that the ancients ignored this. In the hodiernal school, on the contrary, the body is discouraged and, consequently, so is the mind. The student frequently sleeps during classes.
In addition to fostering a beneficial and simultaneous stimulation of body and mind, the peripatetic teaching technique also benefits from the "cinematic" effect of the fusion of the sonically communicated narrative with the alternation and succession of images promoted by the changes in perspective during the walk. Certainly, when enjoying the teacher's classes during the stroll through the Lyceum, the students had the impression that, besides taking part in an activity that was interesting, stimulating and pleasant in itself, in which the lecture was almost an extra component, the very set of stimuli that their mind and body, in a high state of synchronicity, received formed a moving, convincing and memorable experience that could easily be remembered precisely because it shares the mimetic characteristics that make cinema, opera and the theater artistic mediums so immediately recollectable, that is, the singular power of their images, their particularly strong imagistic character insofar as it expresses reality in motion and the very reality of movement.
Contemporary pedagogical "lectureism" therefore imposes an artificial distance between educator and student that is not only physical, as manifested by the number of meters separating the teacher, lecturing behind their desk, from the student sitting at the back of the room, but also mental and even spiritual. The hierarchy of age, social classes and academic titles creates a grotesque and extremely unpleasant abyss between the two groups of participants in the teaching-learning process owing to the fact that it is fundamentally anti-democratic, conservative (in a petty sense of the word) and inhibitory to full human development. Imagine, on the contrary, how accessible a mind as brilliant as Aristotle's would have been as the philosopher strolled through the gardens of the Lyceum, with his apprentices and associates following him at a distance as small as a few centimeters. Indeed, ancient pedagogy, whether peripatetic or not, possessed an attractive subjectivity that has completely disappeared in modern, conventional pedagogy, a way of preserving and stimulating the human element in teaching that has been contemporarily replaced by the bureaucratic automatism of scholastic processes regulated by agendas, precise time measurements, selection and admission processes, spatial and temporal distances, the freezing of - and almost total disregard for - the body etc. Precisely one of the things that ancient philosophers criticized (and rightly so) in their sophistic counterparts was, similarly, their "lectureism" motivated primarily by money. Foreshadowing a similar custom in the modern academic world, the admission fees for their lectures varied according to the financial capacity of the target audience, so that less comprehensive or more basic versions of the same class existed for less affluent audiences and vice versa. Pedagogical "lectureism" has always been recognized as an insufficient technique for true and thorough teaching. In fact, the very idea of teaching, in a very distinct way, has always been totally identified with the ideas of dialogue and dialectics.
In this sense, it is worth seriously considering the capacity of video games not only to promote an environment conducive to dialectical activity, since the freedom of the game allows the learner a more intense creative activity and more daring in their actions, but also, by introducing the player into a ludic environment in which certain tasks or, at least, possibilities are established, to foster the organic union of thought and practice (the horizontal articulation) between the different participants in the pedagogical process. Undoubtedly, although it does not allow for the same excitement and stimulation of the body as is possible through physical activity, the electronic game allows participation in regular shared activities, enabling a recuperation of the democratic, communal, worldly, practical, dialectical, consistent, coherent and even familiar and domestic character of ancient "academic" pedagogy. The recreation and reproduction of a kind of Platonic Academy or Aristotelian Lyceum is entirely possible through the computer and the simulated reality that transpires in it, and the key concept to understanding how this would be possible is the idea of "roleplay".
Undoubtedly, video games already have many educational applications today, especially because, by means of the fluidity and plasticity of programming, it is possible to create ludic systems that articulate different tasks, challenges and routines that, through repeated and constant practice, establish and reinforce processual learning in a formal and controlled environment that exists in the "real world", but, to recover a kind of teaching that resembles that which existed in the old "academies" and institutions of the classical world, it is necessary to go beyond the classroom environment (where, sometimes, games are used as pedagogical support objects) and completely liberate the ludic dimension of the electronic game from its vertical-institutional restriction. Thus, by subverting the passive and receptive logic of the traditional classroom in relation to the student, by their own creative activity, made possible by the horizontal, inventive, unsystematic and mutable reality of the experience (free from vertical constraints) of electronic games, exactly as it is felt when a child, in their free time, plays a video game outside of school, they spontaneously develop a relevant capacity that naturally translates to the "real world", once it is realized in the simulacrum. In other words, far more important than instilling in students the knowledge of the processes to be employed, or familiarizing them with systematic sets of tasks to be performed, is developing their creative capacity for innovation, something that can only be done when we grant them an autonomy and responsibility that the vertical and alienating experience of typical school teaching makes impossible.
This is where the inventive and liberating profundity of "roleplay" comes into play, its capacity to transpose the subjectivity of individuals and, in doing so, to salute them with an expansion of their noetic horizons that is both pleasurable and challenging. Make-believe is the best form of teaching because, after the matter-of-factly lived experience that, in its capacity to guide the individual, forces, through firsthand experience, the development of certain skills, it is the best approximation of this same lived experience, and the virtual reality of electronic games can greatly assist in the reproduction of this experience. For this, however, it is necessary to liberate, to some extent, the student from the teacher's tutelage and allow the very reality of the simulation, with its dynamics that approximate simulated reality (the object, rather than the subject, of simulation), to guide the student and teach what it has to teach through the concrete reality of experience. Thus, the teacher becomes a mere companion during the pedagogical process, an agent whose stature is almost equal to that of the student, because both place themselves below lived experience which, in the concreteness of the simulated reproduction of reality, becomes the true master, the true sage to whom both teacher and student bow their heads.
This elevation of simulation to the level of ultimate teacher and master offers great teaching potential that is already being exploited, for example, when airplane pilots train in flight simulations. But here the learning aspect, however much it obliges the subject to a certain creative activity and confers them autonomy, is limited to the apprehension of a specific technique or to the reproduction of what is fundamentally a set of techniques and technical skills. The capacity of the electronic game to transform itself into the true master and the true matrix of teaching, as life itself is, always has been, and always will be, falls far short of its full potential. To conclude by repeating the essential points: the Greeks knew that the great teacher of life is none other than life itself, and that all the teachers and instructors in the world are nothing more than companions and facilitators who try to clarify for us those messages and teachings that the great master, dispensing and indicating in her typically obscure and impenetrable language, merely implies and never explicitly states in a completely clear way; that the teaching-learning process occurs on both a bodily and a mental level, one being dependent on the other and vice versa; that true teaching – that is, preparation for the attainment of wisdom and virtue, as can be inferred, for example, from fragment number 65 of Democritus: "one must practice, not learning much, but thinking much" – cannot be taught in a classroom or through lectures, but rather must be learned through dialogue and dialectics, which can only exist and fully develop in the horizontal and permissive context of a spontaneous, informal reality that is not characterized by any type of arbitrary or institutional noetic control, and which bows its head before the teacher that is life, with its wisdom and mysterious ways.
