Shakespeare ... Steinbeck ... Harper Lee ... Ni no Kuni

Jeff Clark is no wide-eyed idealist, straight out of teacher-training and thrust into some modern Blackboard Jungle. He's a family man in his 30s. He served with the U.S. National Guard in Baghdad.

He has been teaching for 10 years, and is well respected by students, parents and colleagues.

He enjoys video games, like BioShock Infinite, and plays them in his spare time. Some years ago, he organized an after-school club to play Madden. Kids at school know that he will speak knowledgeably about games.

He recently became interested in the idea of gamification in education, of layering achievements into the learning process. Many companies are selling ways to use games to teach specific lessons, and there's even crossover with commercial game companies. Minecraft and Portal 2 both have educational programs. However, these are geared more towards the teaching of math and sciences than English and liberal arts.

"I'm a sixth grade English teacher," says Clark, "so I was thinking, 'How can I tie in language with these video games?' I started to look at games that have really potent narratives and that aren't ultra-violent, that I could bring into the classroom to teach kids that video games today hire professional writers to write the story elements of these games."

He understood that trying to fund his idea through school budgets would be problematic, budgets being tight at the best of times, and so he went onto Kickstarter, made a modest proposition, picked up some media coverage and raised the necessary money, $4,250.

The games he has purchased for his lessons include Braid, Eternal Sonata, Ni no Kuni, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Journey and Okami. Many would agree, this selection displays excellent taste.

The kids are excited. At first, when the consoles arrived in the classroom, the novelty was almost a distraction. Clark says, "You can imagine how hard it was for them to concentrate on Fractured Fairy Tales while all that new tech is in the back of the room staring at them.

"They have these consoles at home. That's the funny thing. When you think of school and the traditional classroom, and then you put games in there, that's what really shocks kids, and in a good way."

Games today tackle complex human issues. They are sometimes layered with believable characters engaged in emotional relationships.

The populace as a whole is comfortable with games. We play them and relax while our kids play them. They are no longer seen as alien.

But despite their positives, do they work as a medium for teaching English?

Austin Grossman is a writer and game designer, the author of recently published novel You. He says, "There's something about games that offers kids ownership, in a way that literature does not. Books as capital-L Literature can be intimidating, but kids lose their intellectual timidity around games — they'll reason about a game, analyze it, tear it to shreds."

He adds, "Games offer literal ownership over the story — players are put directly in charge of some part of what happens, so they feel more able to put themselves in the protagonist's place, speculate about a character's motives, talk about what the outcome[s] of various choices were and why. They get a hybrid space that's both experiencing a story and experimenting with authorship, a place to reason actively about the aesthetic and ethical issues narratives raise so well."

But how powerful are games really, in teaching a subject like literature? How do they stand up against those formidable works in the canon that are used to educate and edify the young — Shakespeare, Dickens, Steinbeck and Lee?

John Stinneford teaches older children at the school, and is a friend of Clark's. He's decided to play devil's advocate, if not entirely against video games, at least for those who question their value alongside the greatest works of literature.

He says, "I think that Jeff will do a fantastic job with it. My question is, how do you segue, or how do you transition from games as an instructional tool into a full appreciation for language and for literature, for the things that can only be experienced by delving into a novel or a poem?"

Clark believes that the process of moving between art forms is natural for children, that interest in game stories leads to other forms. "Children today don't really make distinctions," he says. "If they are interested in something, they follow it up, without worrying too much about the delivery format."

Stinneford admits to a certain intellectual playfulness with this line of thinking. Since he was a rookie teacher 18 years ago, he's used lyrics from contemporary pop songs to teach poetry. Something that seemed like an innovation in the early 1990s is now mainstream, an extremely useful way of connecting with students.

He agrees that games will likely be a bigger part of the classroom in years to come.

Stinneford isn't planning on using console games in his classes any time soon, but he says that it's usually a bad idea to ignore popular entertainment. "Kids aren't raised with a book in their hands," he says. "It's usually either an iPhone or a tablet or some form of gadget. That's their world. If we separate ourselves, we're going to do more harm than good. We're going to distance ourselves."

Some of the most irksome obstacles to teachers today are the demands of national and state-level administrators who have imposed structures and formulae on classrooms that restrict the individualism of teachers and their students.