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Personalized Learning: the Best Education Or the Worst?
theodp writes: In an exclusive interview with Education Week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about why he is shifting his K-12 giving priorities to personalized learning. While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense." But just days later, Fordham University professor Mark Naison wrote in the Washington Post about why the personalized learning efforts of 'a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets,' which presumably includes Zuck, make him 'incredibly pessimistic' about the future of public education. That Zuck — like fellow personalized learning cheerleaders/funders Bill Gates and former U.S. Education Chief Arne Duncan — seemed to be unaware of studies on personalized learning studies that date back to the '70s is troubling. But people don't "Like" 40+ year-old Ed.gov papers, so Zuck could be forgiven for not seeing them and, as a result, believing that the personalized learning plan dashboard his Facebook engineers knocked out truly is the ground-breaking solution to 'one of education's biggest problems' that Melinda Gates cracks it up to be.
Personalised is the way to go. It doesn't matter how much is spent on public if there's even one psychopathic bully shitting on it all. And there's often a lot more than one.
enough said Mr. education expert.
How do you work that? King impregnates princess and prince has half-sister-mother? That I can believe. Mostly a Russian thing if you follow old history, not the new stuff, which is more of a
VOTE TRUMP 2016
I don't know who said, "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know," but this is not the conclusion a great number of intelligent people automatically arrive at.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense."
All sorts of things "just make sense" that are actually completely wrong when objectively examined. That's why we do experiments to see if they actually work before rolling them out in a big way. Basing policy on a hunch is REALLY stupid unless you have no other choice and this is not one of those times where we have no other choice. Maybe he's in the test phase but it sure doesn't sound like an experiment. It's annoying how Zuckerberg (and Gates) thinks that because he was successful in software that it somehow qualifies him to be something more than a bank account for areas of endeavor where he demonstrably has no special expertise or insight. At least Gates no longer has a day job so conceivably he has the time to actually devote to the details of these issues. There is no way Zuckerberg actually has enough time to really do much more than parrot what the people he hired are telling him.
Education (like many things) is not just a bunch of "tools and resources", but a process. I.e. to improve outcome it's not enough to just give better tools if the ability to use those tools is not a match. In practise there can be better teaching methods under certain circumstances, but can result in worse results when applied in scale. Sometimes a simple, well understood process is better than a more advanced one. That's why pen&paper with lacking features is still pretty competitive to computers, it has less shortcomings and points of failure.
The problem with 40+ years old studies on computer aided learning is the computing lanscape has changed so much since then they are mostly irrelevant. Even the University of Illinois at Urbana is making the shift offering on-line education.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Intuition is not data and it's usually wrong. You should know better than this Zuck...
What bothers me about "personalized" learning is that at some point, these people will need to interact with others, so there must be commonality. Being able to communicate and share ideas is absolutely vital- and the language behind the ideas and how they are represented are a vital aspect of the idea itself. Personalization may help an individual, but it can hurt in the collective sense, where the people must work with the ideas of others.
The OP references two papers from the 70's. Both are about PLATO. Plato wasn't the only game in town. There were other successful experiments in individualized learning in the late 60's and 70's including Nova (Broward County, FL) funded by Westinghouse and (then) HEW. Methodologies that allow learning at an individual pace and don't try to teach what the student already knows were proven to work. Teachers weren't eliminated. Their role changed from regurgitating information to mentoring and managing by exception. The teachers have to be good, though as they had to be able to address any topic in the subject area at any point and couldn't rely on presenting prepared sermons.
As for the professor in the Post article, he seems to be moaning about technology forcing change in his profession. Where have we heard that before? I suspect what it will really do for educators is remove the mundane rote aspects and leave the interesting challenges. To quote Eric Shinseki: If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.
You can't effectively teach 1-10th grade math in the same class. So we age-tier because we think that's a reasonable approximation of skill-tier or just to split it up so you've had all the parts of the curriculum. Or think why you have divisions in leagues, you learn by playing roughly equal levels with a few better, a few worse than yourself but if you're just trivially beating them or being crushed you learn nothing. That doesn't mean I think individual learning is the one true answer, you learn a lot of valuable lessons explaining and being explained to, cooperating, correcting each other and so on. But ideally you'd do that with your peers in skill.
If you have some time dedicated to working individually it'd be a lot easier to create a dynamic, personalized schedule where you are in peer groups with others of comparable skill. Today it's mostly impossible to say follow the class of the grade above you because then you have something else, either you must jump a year in every subject or you're pretty much stuck where you are. Of course there's also other concern like like a stable social group you can develop inter-personal relations and skills with but it's not like you exclusively played with those in your class anyway. In the pauses between classes you'd play with other kids anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If we forgive him that he did not see and thus did not know that it existed, all others should be forgiven that we did not know he (or others) patented anything.
And if the 40 years is a too long time, then perhaps we should be forgiven for things we copy illegally after say 14 years.
If he just did not read it; then perhaps he should understand that his terms of joining FB are not read and thus null and void.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I find that personalized meal service - where you provide your specific preferences and dislikes, along with any allergy information and your personal weight and fitness goals, is by far the most effective way to enjoy your meal and maximize your health. In fact, as a billionaire, its the only way I can see to get and keep everyone healthy. It just takes some planning and seed funding to create a few proof-of-concept restaurants that can do just that. After that it should be simple to, for example, provide the exact same personalized service to the entire deployed military forces for their daily meals.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What is it about succeeding in a tech business that makes people think they are all of a sudden the world's leading authority on everything. Bill Gate and Zuckerberg obviously know education because... they made software. Bill Gates knows about vaccines and world health because... he made software.
Apparently if you succeed in software you are automatically the leading authority on everything.
OK, before any dissent starts, I was publicly educated, have a PhD, and have taught high-school and up.
Public education does not need to be personalized.
It needs to do the basics: math, reading, languages, writing, history ( uncensored ), science and a few topics like how to balance a checkbook, cook, and maybe some general shop. Notice I did not specify gender.
These things are nedded for general citizenry. So they should be taugh in the public schools.
Personalized education is for specialty topics - magnet school classes should be after normal school.....
Art, music, literature, acting, chess, poker, sewing, cooking and such should be part of the parental obligation. NOT public schools.
Football, sports, and such are side-interests as far as education goes.
Now the general populace (and some of /. ) are decidedly not cooperative.
Football parents, little-league parents, dance-class parents, Soccer Moms and Dads are generally too focused on their own preferences to realize these may be educational, but are not the meat of an education, merely the frosting.
Helicopter parents are the worst offenders - little Johnny and sweet Suzie are more crippled by them than having both arms broken.
And the Fed would do well to start getting away from "designed lunches" and remember what they are - servants, NOT masters.
I wouldn't take advice from an educational specialist who had never taught in middle/high school for 3 years, or from a bureaucrat following advice from one of them, either.
In my own experience, I benefited from moving beyond my peers in mathematics and in language. I could definitely see a tiered learning, where the tiers were broken down by ability and/or subject and not arbitrary age. We constantly test our students, so why not make those tests actually mean something? Then, you get your high school diploma when you actually are able to demonstrate proficiency with the subjects and you're not held back going over subjects that you've already "mastered" just because of your age.
And quite honestly, if the US federal government stopped placing such a high priority on enabling (read: funding) every person to go to college and instead sunk that money into the K-12 public education system, maybe we would have much better results with kids coming out of high schools and able to enter the work force at better than minimum wage jobs, and college could once again go back to being for more specialized education.
from Wikipedia: ... was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. ... The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker."
"Helen Adams Keller
There are numerous examples, probably even in your community, of disabled people who are enabled by special efforts. It would be interesting to see examples of gifted people who are enabled by extraordinary methods.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Is that pronounced like Suck?
The tech billionaires are showing themselves to be the creepy control freaks they really are. Here's an idea, make it impossible to hire H1B Visas and other foreign talent so they're forced to do training for those "Jobs Americans won't/can't" do and let them put THEIR money into THEIR learning programs. Leave my kids out of it. And hey, maybe there will be a job in tech for American kids graduating from American Universities that pay what they're worth rather than 20-30% less because they've got a collection of foreign slaves to exploit at the expense of EVERYONE native to the US.
Oh I know, here come the barrage of "I'm a racist xenophobe" because I'd prefer America to be mostly American rather than something else. If you think that you're either a moron or a foreigner yourself. Plane and simple.
We're pretty much experimenting with our kids education every day.
That doesn't mean we're experimenting with the policies surrounding their education every day at a regional, state or national level. Changes come slowly in education for the most part.
Common Core has been a miserable disaster and it was a large-scale, government run, "scientifically backed" curriculum deployment.
Since Common Core has only been in operation for a few years it's a little premature to declare it a "miserable disaster". I'm not arguing for or against it but I think it's going to take a little while to really determine if it works or not. My guess is that if it ultimately works it's going to take a while to work the kinks out.
Unfortunately the funding isn't there, teachers don't understand the rules and guidelines, kids are most certainly not picking up on the material in any sort of ground-breaking way, and parents are upset and frustrated
Presuming that is all true that speaks to a botched implementation but doesn't really say much clearly about the fundamental idea, good or bad.
You can't form a single education plan and universally apply it to 50 million children.
Sure you can and other countries have done just that with some success. You just can't make it the entire plan for all those children. There is a reason it is called Common Core and not Common Plan. Will Common Core be a good thing at the end of the day? I have no idea but I'm pretty sure the path to get there will be bumpy.
While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense." But just days later, Fordham University professor Mark Naison wrote in the Washington Post about why the personalized learning efforts of 'a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets,' ...
So did the theories of a flat Earth being the center of the Universe at one time. Seems to me like this Zucker just wants to teach people what's useful to him and his profit-seeking, investment-capital buddies. There are benefits to (a) a common educational base and (b) a well-rounded one - at least as a base.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Home schoolers" have been successfully using personalised learning for quite some time.
Home schooled children regularly do better than those who are publicly educated in spelling bees and standardised tests. The difficulty is ensuring that one keeps them sufficiently engaged with others of their age.
Homeschoolers have been delivering "personalized education" for many years. Everything from choosing a complete curriculum and allowing the student to proceed at their own pace, to developing a completely custom curriculum from various sources.
My own child participates in a program called "Classical Conversations" which provides a large chunk of the curriculum, and there are weekly sessions with a small group. Math we are doing via an online course.
FWIW, my child is sixth grade aged, and is doing 7th+ grade level work. Is this because my child is inherently intelligent? Because of the one on one teaching? Because the curriculum happens to fit with her learning style? Who knows. But she is excelling and, IMHO, getting a far better education than she ever would in a public school where they spend the vast majority of their effort making sure the lowest performers make it over the bar rather than helping the high achievers reach their potential.
Teacher here. Personalized learning absolutely gets the best results, but it's basically impossible to implement effectively, because the options for doing so are:
1. Personalize instruction for every student in a regular classroom with a regular distribution of skill. The problem with this is that a typical distribution of skills means that a single class can include students that are 4 grade levels ahead of their actual grade, bored out of their head with material that they mastered years ago, and students that are 4 grade levels behind, and hopelessly out of their depth. Personalizing instruction for that many students means that each one gets only a few minutes per class period of instruction from the teacher that is directly relevant to them. That's fine for students who are self-directed and self-motivated, but not for the larger student population. Also, this setup obliges the teacher to create half a dozen or more distinct lessons for each class period, which requires an impossible amount of time to be spent on lesson planning.
2. Massively increase the teacher to student ratio, solving the problems in option 1 by giving each individual teacher a dramatically smaller number of students to work with. This, of course, would require a much larger amount of education funding, which isn't likely to happen, as well as a large number of people who are qualified to become teachers.
3. Split students into classes based on skill level, solving the problems in option 1 by ensuring a smaller range of ability in each classroom. This was common practice at one time, and was called "ability grouping" or "tracking." It was done away with because it was felt that students in lower ability groups were not getting an equal education. This led to many parents insisting on students being placed in inappropriately-high level classes, which itself led to the higher level classes being watered down to accommodate students that should not have been in them in the first place. Also, the uneven racial and gender distribution among different ability groups led to accusations of racism and sexism, to which there was indeed some merit.
So, basically, we have one option that's impossible for purely practical reasons, another that won't happen because of budgetary concerns, and another that won't happen because parents all think that their child deserves to be in the top level classes regardless of actual demonstrated ability.
I've been a fan of homeschooling for years and plan to teach all of my kids via this method.
When I was misdiagnosed as being mentally retarded due to an undiagnosed hearing loss in one ear, I spent eight years in Special Ed classes. What personalize learning meant in that context was that the teachers babysat the students and the school district collected the extra money from the state. That was the late 1970's and early 1980's. Since I wasn't mentally retarded (I blew out the annual evaluation exams on the genius side, which the teachers called statistical flukes), I was regarded as being a well-behaved idiot. Not sure if things have gotten better since then.
I think that one benefit to personalized learning that is often overlooked is the transparent and clear assignments.
My high schooler was lost in his math and English classes and it was impossible for us as parents to help him at home. The teachers did not use the on-line system at their disposal to share upcoming assignments and due dates. Assignments were only posted on line after the due date and with no information as to what the assignment was.
Upon moving him into on-line classes for English and Math, he is now learning the material, able to know exactly what is expected, and is getting much better grades. It is unfortunate that in our case the solution was to remove him from the classroom and all the benefits having a teacher brings. I continually try to get my student's teachers to make assignments available on-line but with amazingly limited success.
I don't know if this example strictly falls under the category of "personalized learning", but the best learning experience I ever had was in my Navy "A" school, that is, the school where I learned my job specialty; in this case, aviation electronics technician. Considering I began in late 1980, the way this learning system worked was pretty advanced.
I don't know the specifics of how the program was developed, but I believe the Navy, working with engineers at IBM, created the system. They took your personal information such as education level, grades, ASVAB score, and even your SAT or ACT score (if you had one) and fed this into some sort of algorithm. The computer (named "Jim-Jim") then developed a course of study for you, with predicted completion times for each module. You then started the self-taught course following the instructions in the reading materials, and given to you by "Jim-Jim". If you needed help, there were instructors available to offer explanation or to delve deeper into concepts. Each module was fairly short and there was a test at the end of each module. A score of 100% was required to pass each test. Any questions missed, and Jim-Jim would send you back to your cubicle for study and/or help from your instructor. You could then re-take the questions you missed. This process continued until you got 100% or failed so many times as to get washed out of the program (a rarity).
There were no boring lectures, or having to suffer through stupid questions from your classmates. You didn't feel like you had to compete with your classmates because the course was self-paced -- the only "person" you were racing against was Jim-Jim. So long as you progressed through the course, passed your tests, and completed things in the time alloted, the instructors pretty much left you alone. If you got far enough ahead of the computer you would even get awarded a day off now and then. Each school day was only a half-day long (you might be in the morning section or the afternoon section). That time could be devoted to study, if you needed it, or if you were far enough ahead, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted.
I enjoyed the school. I found the course challenging enough, yet still managed to stay ahead of the computer schedule. In fact, I enjoyed the challenge of seeing how far ahead of Jim-Jim I could get. I'm sure it was a good deal for the Navy too. Because of the 100% required for passing, they were ensured that everyone who got through the course had been sufficiently exposed to 100% of the material.
Could such a system work in the real world? I don't know. The Navy had an advantage that the real world doesn't in that they could motivate people who were not self-motivated. There were all kinds of creative punishment available if you got behind -- and the last thing you wanted was to get washed out of the course and sent to the fleet. In that case you might spend your whole time in the Navy just chipping paint or working in the laundry.
In short, I would like personalized learning, but I'm pretty self-motivated. I'm not sure how well it would work for kids who didn't give a damn, and who you could not put any pressure on.
Proverbs 21:19
This will be one more poorly thought out wild faddish lurch in educational policy, to the detriment of kid's education. I don't mean that PL is bad or wrong, but that this, like most changes in education will be introduced in a way that will tend toward failure. There's a long list of essentially good ideas that have been horribly botched by taking them to Broadway before the bumps and wrinkles in the script have been ironed out. The smart way to eventually get to an eventual large scale educational change is to start small with testing in very small pilot projects, iterating them independently until one or several paths to good outcomes, and just as importantly, paths to avoid, are identified. And then, scale up to bigger pilot projects. New issues will probably pop up at a new scale, and then after really seeing how it works, and IF it works, really scale up. But that requires long term, realistic planning and leadership that can look out to the horizon. A scarce resource. In the meantime, most investment should remain in iterative improvements in the mainstream - getting and creating more qualified teachers - through better training and for the most difficult disciplines, math, physics science, extending the budget to get people who really know, love and can teach hard to teach subjects. People love to flog "the new math" and Common Core, but if you look at content and intent, they are excellent ideas, but both needed radically different introduction, and needed a lot of the wrinkles sorted out. I was one of the few lucky kids who truly benefited from "the new math". I had good teachers who "got it", who had a fair grasp on sets and modular math and and .... at an elementary level. When I hit those topics later, I wasn't lost. It all made sense.
Don't step on the baby.
Back in the day, there used to be a bunch of books with a form factor resembling the Barrons/Princeton Review study guides, but the internal format was different: it was a quiz question followed by an answer. The idea was that you can advance at your own pace, but if you didn't understand the material you would stop turning pages and could retreat back to an earlier point and resume the course.
The idea made perfect sense, but the rate of progress was so slow that I invariably grew impatient. You could work through 100 pages and learn about 10 pages of material in a different text. One of the better ones, which isn't marketed as "Programmed Instruction", is the "Little Schemer" series by the MIT CS professors. Even that seemed a little bit laborious.
get their education? Yes, probably I can google it to find out but my feeling is these smart guys and others were well educated (reading, writing, math, organizing, critical thinking, managing, etc.) but it didn't come from many of these whiz-bang concepts they are promoting (it didn't exist for them). I see it as they got a good education during their childhood/teenager years so they immediately able to absorb high level college courses (unlike many of us had to struggle at JC to catch up of what we didn't get in HS). But these guys forgot of what it takes to be well grounded in this stuff they figured don't need to waste all that time, just jump right into high level stuff. Yeah, lots of luck jumping into a Boeing 787 before learning the basics in a Cessna 182 (but also need to be able to read the manual and follow instructions from the CFI).
Or maybe it is all part of a scheme to end public schooling and return to the days where your family either taught you at home (before you take up a job at local factory along with other children) or wealthy enough to send you to private school.
mfwright@batnet.com
Have you seen Mark Dice? We have plenty of people in college that have no business being there because they don't know anything worth knowing, while having their heads filled with meaningless garbage (Kardashians, Snookie, Brad Pitt etc)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Maybe this gentleman should look at the current state of public education in this country today. It's broken. It's unfixable. The parents don't care if their children get a decent education; the school boards and districts do not care about educating the kids - they care about preserving their jobs; the teachers unions do not care about educating the children - they care only about making life easier for their membership. And the federal and state level bureaucracies don't care either - for the usual and obvious reasons. As for the Gates's and the Zuckerbergs, let them put their charity dollars where they want, but try real hard not to believe that they are experts about anything and don't give any heed to their pontificating. If you want your child to have a good education, send him or her to a quality PRIVATE school. Sending your child to public school qualifies as serious child abuse IMNSHO. As Robert Heinlein wrote decades ago, "Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy".
Why the hell doesn't the summary use his full name? I didn't think anything could make Mark Zuckerberg more annoying, but this certainly proved me wrong. Calling him "Zuck" just sound so retarded it makes my head hurt.
as a bleriot is to a 787. Same underlying principles, but far richer and more integrated means. Yes, there are 40 year old papers discussing the merits of 512x512 graphics and air powered microfiche, but we're a bit beyond that. Mostly in the increasing symmetry between consumption and creation by learners. Educational resources are commodities. Textbooks, videos, eBooks, etc. are available from a wide array of providers. Ditto the wrappers - blackboard, canvas, edx, etc... The wrappers are now also a commodity. Given the state of formal education, a coordinating wrapper around all of these resources is not bad. We used to call those wrappers a classroom/instructor. Gates and Zuck will have to complete in the marketplace, their chief advantage will be already having a mess of people in their ecosystem who will have to learn one less login. Just like there is no best way to teach, there is no best way to teach online. There are a lot of good ways to teach, and a lot of good ways to teach online. Gates and Zuck having a product with a large population to please is really no different from the current state of textbooks, which amounts to "I'll have what Cali and Texas are having" given they have historically had the largest state-buys for textbooks.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
As Robert Heinlein wrote decades ago, "Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy".
On the flip side, if you want to conspire to make your kids lives easier than their peers by letting them avoid the challenge they would have getting a decent education in a public school...
Sure as a parent, there is a certain amount of shielding you want to give your kids (say if the local public school was infested with gangs, guns, drugs, etc.), but tracking your kids at an early age to an highly academic (or religious depending on your school) program might better serve your desires as a parent, than their interests as a life learner. There is also something to be said about exposure to diversity (in religion, ethnicity, income, etc) that is greater in a public school environment.
And if your goal is actually to send your kid to an "ivy-league" school, you might actually be better off with having them attend a public school because of the big-fish-little-pond effect. Not just an antecdoe, but actually illustrated by this study
Something to think about...
I'd use conventional classes, but have about seven for speed (up to +/- 3 standard deviations from normal speed of learning) by seven for style of learning, producing 49 classes per subject at any given level. I'd abandon the notion of years entirely and allow people to slip between classes freely. The reason for slippage is not just so that a person can throttle up/down their learning, but it's also because some people are excellent support for others that aren't necessarily in the same stream. You have to allow individuals to do what is best for the group, should they wish to do so, even if it sacrifices some of their own understanding.
I'd use nutritional theory to supplement this - three smaller meals over the school day, for easier digestion, tuned to provide the best nutrition for mind and body as understood at the time, without being so exotic that kids won't eat. Fast food of any kind, and anything containing HFCS or other nutritionally dubious substances should be banned outright from campus. High sugar just high enough to mask excess bitterness (say, in tea or coffee) is tolerable as long as consumption is limited to three cups of each a day, but it's best if nothing with added sugar is present. Complex carbohydrates produce a much more evenly sustained level of energy.
Psychology is also important. Classes should be time-tabled for an individual according to their attention span and recovery rate. There's no point in overloading someone with information they can't absorb, but there's also no point in letting kids get excessively bored as it's hard to recover the pace if you lose momentum.
That's as personalized as you need. Computers may assist in that process, but computer-based learning will always be inferior to group learning that includes computer assistance.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're assuming the current state (public education with a uniform curriculum) is the default state
That would be correct. Any changes are going to be from the current state and any change that results in a regression or stagnation in performance or performance/cost should be rejected.
The correct default state is actually no education.
Nonsense. This isn't drug testing where we are comparing against a placebo to see if it has any effect. Any change to the educational system that doesn't improve on what we already have (cost and/or outcomes) is wasteful. To disprove the null hypothesis requires that a given change (say customized curriculums) will result in a statistically significant improvement in outcomes and/or cost. There is no point in proving that a method is an improvement over no education unless it is also better than our current system.
Like the effect filesharing has had on music/movie distribution costs, computers and the Internet reduce most of the cost-reducing benefit of a uniform curriculum to near zero.
First off there is no such thing as a uniform curriculum in the real world. The fact that we require certain subjects to be taught to all isn't the same thing as a uniform curriculum. Second, your comparison with file sharing is specious and has no bearing on the actual economics of education because education doesn't work like you are supposing. The internet doesn't magically make the marginal cost of teaching a student go anywhere close to zero, nor do tools to customize a curriculum. They can help but they are hardly the magical elixir you are supposing.
And anyway he's offering to pay for the experiment so what are you complaining about?
That he is presuming the outcome prior to the experiment. I should have thought that was obvious.
Around 2000, computers and the Internet (better, cheaper communications) made it feasible for you to custom-order exactly what options you want in your car and have the factory manufacture it that way.
The error in your thinking is presuming that the economics of education work like those of manufacturing. They don't. Education is very difficult to scale effectively. The notion that the internet and other technology tools has reduced marginal cost to provide teaching services to zero is demonstrably untrue.
Where in the world did we get this insane notion that education should be totally or even primarily outsourced to someone else in a building down the road a ways?
School in its various incarnations is a useful tool, but children learn *everywhere*, all the time. So do adults, if they are paying attention.
How about we focus our efforts on using the best available tools for the right jobs, and stop expecting "somebody else" to do all the hard parts?
Raising kids "right" starts before they're even conceived, and involves a lifelong commitment to seeing that your offspring get the very best you can provide in the way of teaching, providing, leading, guiding, and also getting the heck out of their way sometimes.
So, every kid, regardless of what happens for the minority of time spent in an institution of public forced indoctrination, gets a unique individual learning experience, whether you like it or not, and whether you planned it or mandated it or not. Sometimes it's a good one, far too often it's a neglectful one.
If you plan for schools to raise your kid, you're doing it wrong.
WALSTIB!
the teachers
unions do not care about educating the children - they care only about making life easier for their membership.
Thank goodness for that, it is their job! I support union rights, but I don't like it when unions get involved in things other than collective bargaining and enforcing said bargain. If the teacher unions acting like police unions, the children would be suffering for it.
I read most of Heinlein's books. They were fiction. They said lots of different things. He didn't say that particular thing in a way that brings insight, he only said it in a way that tells you that character's character.
You probably learned about "the state of public education" from AM radio or cable news, because the state of private education is identical. The range of offerings in public and private school teaching systems is exactly the same. If you are in a wealthy neighborhood, the public school will not be distinguishable from a private school with the same income level parents. And a private school that is run by donations and has mostly poor students, will not be different from their neighboring public school. Duh. My parents were poor and found the poor neighborhood that was on the edge of rich school's side of the line, so I got a high quality public school education. The results are not different from the private schools, except that some of the private schools also teach religion.
Heck, if you really want to make sure your kid doesn't have it easy and has to learn the hard way and become a Heinleinian Uberman, just leave him out the woods to grow up with animals. If he lives, he'll be the smartest, best educated, most self-driven man in the world. If you deny him that opportunity, there is no way for him to overcome that handicap later.
Don't handicap your kids by making their lives easy. If you want them to learn to overcome, at least cut off their feet or something so they don't have it so easy.
To really offer any sense of personalized learning, you need to kill the concept of distinct classes and "grades". And by grades, I mean those splits in classes based on progress. Horribly flawed system since it just leads to prejudice and slowing down those less advantaged, and usually puts a bunch of students in with noisy, disruptive kids that simply don't want to learn. (of course, I have seen some good ways to treat these sorts of kids, giving them their own custom education tied to them, giving them headphones to listen to music to relax them, some little simple things like that)
Class-based layout of education is the most central part of education, so good luck with that.
It would require a complete rework of the system.
Of course, if you keep it only to tertiary education, it would be trivial since you can make those people pay tens of thousands out the ass for it :^).
I just want a personal copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".
Even if I'm not young, or a lady.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
Four Reasons to Worry About “Personalized Learning”
By Alfie Kohn
Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”
A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.”
A suffix can change everything. When you attach -ality to sentiment, for example, you end up with what Wallace Stevens called a failure of feeling. When -ized is added to personal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc. (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.
Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.
Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.
For some time, corporations have sold mass-produced commodities of questionable value and then permitted us to customize peripheral details to suit our “preferences.” In the 1970s, Burger King rolled out its “Have it your way!” campaign, announcing that we were now empowered to request a recently thawed slab of factory-produced ground meat without the usual pickle — or even with extra lettuce! In America, I can be me!
A couple of decades later, the production company that created Barney, the alarmingly friendly purple dinosaur, sold personalized videos called “My Party with Barney.” You mailed them a photo of your kid’s face and they digitally attached it to a generic animated child’s body that “plays” with Barney in the video. Your kid’s name is also inserted into the soundtrack every so often to complete the customization, with Barney enthusing: “Have a balloon Abigail!” The result may have delighted, or even fooled, some three year olds. But why in god’s name are adult educators buying the equivalent of My Party with Barney in order to boost their students’ reading scores?
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How can we tell when the lovely idea of personal learning has been co-opted and then twisted into PLI? Here are four warning signs:
1. The tasks have been personalized for kids, not created by them. With PLI, the center of gravity is outside the students (as Dewey once put it), and their choices are limited to when — or maybe, if they’re lucky, how – they’ll master a set of skills mandated by people who have never met them. In the words of education author Will Richardson, “’Personalized’ learning is something that we do to kids; ‘personal’ learning is something they do for themselves.”
Sometimes one of the corporate folks will let slip an acknowledgement of just how student-centered their programs aren’t. “In education,” a publishing executive explained to a reporter, personalization is “not about giving students what they want, it’s about a recommended learning path just for them.” A t
[Posting Anonymously]
I quit school at Christmas break in Grade 12. I found it boring beyond belief, and by then had enough. I remember overhearing a phone conversation between the School Principal and my mother in May of the school year where he divulged my IQ had tested above 135 and indicating that if I would just go back for the last three weeks of the Academic Year "he could still graduate". I refused.
There existed the option of going to a gifted program where students were expected to skip a year, but I wasn't eligible as I was already a year younger than my classmates, since pre-school testing allowed me to start Grade 1 at age 5 (I never attended kindergarten).
That was partly because I already had my full credits for Maths (2 classes), Literature (2 classes) and some Sciences (Physics) because my teachers in those subjects allowed me to work independently, ahead of the class. This in a non-semestered program in the Public School System in Canada, so you can't graduate from any class before June.
My Chem and Biology teachers refused to allow me to do my Labs outside the schedule, and you had to put in your time for my 2nd Language and Phys Ed classes, (mandatory for graduation) so I got failing grades in those. (Some of my final grades: a 91 in Physics and an 8 in Chemistry, which I found amusing to no end).
So I do have some Grade 12 Credits, just not enough to Graduate.
Now, I'm retired at 58 and have a 4-year B.A. (Honours) Degree but no High School Diploma.
... we called it an apprenticeship.
You can NOT educate people who have entirely different contexts of knowledge. So this is where the tradition "common core" of knowledge is necessary for everyone. The big mistake is presuming that EVERYONE needs to be college-bound or PhD-level in their preparation - the least common denominator may need to be either lower or tiered/plateaued (which is an aspect of personalization).
There is also the matter of personalization in learning styles. This is definitely where a "one size fits all" of US public schools is Epic Fail especial in terms of not "tracking" different personal performance levels. This can range from a Montessori style discovery vs. a Asian style rote method. This includes gifted students vs. middle students vs. not-either students - it only harms to have everyone at the same level out of political correct "fairness" or ideology. Reality doesn't work like that.
The key is there isn't a magical top-down solution that doesn't allow flexible interpretation and adjustment in the specific individual cases!