There is No "Pokemon Gap"

While educators debated whether children learn to read best through drill-and-practice phonics or "whole language" instruction, Nintendo was, quite informally, teaching a generation of children how to read. Pokemon also taught children how to analyze and classify more than 700 different types of creatures through trading cards that were dense with specialized, technical, cross-referenced text. Gee would later call Pokemon "perhaps the best literacy curriculum ever conceived." He offered the observation that he knew of no "Pokemon gap" among poor or minority children. "Certainly the capitalists who made and sell Pokemon have more trust in nonwhite and poor children than that," he said. Gee predicted, a bit cynically, that if we were to turn Pokemon into a school subject, "certain children, many of them poor, would all of a sudden have trouble learning Pokemon.