“Despite the best efforts over the last century, the educational systems are almost unanimously criticized by all observers as being too dry, too mechanical, too bland, too focused on quantitative results and measures (more on this last point later). They all say that children are playful and curious, but that schooling and education, at least partly, kill that spark. Univocally, commentators ask for a more humanized, sensitive, and person-centric form of education—but from thereon, unsurprisingly, the ideas and analyses begin to differ.
The question thus presents itself:
“If almost all commentators, educational science scholars, teachers, school principals, philosophers and psychologists of education agree that a more alive and engaging form of schooling and education are needed—why does the conventional schooling system persist?”
This is an important question. Different answers to this question are possible, but here we would like to offer a simple, but strong explanation: Education faces a problem of scaling. It is no secret that individual students have different talents, interests, needs, and ways of learning. Yet, if you put children together in a class, and classes together in a school, and schools unified under one nationally defined curriculum, you are forced to design education for the average (or median) student. Individual teachers can make some adjustments to their different pupils, but most of them will after all attend the same lessons, use the same teaching materials, and do the same tests. Schooling systems can allow for some student autonomy, but even this is limited—not all classes can be electable, and too much autonomy without guidance can lose some of the scaffolding and support that conventional teaching offers.
It has even been compellingly argued by neuroscientist Erik Hoel, in his Substack article “Why we stopped making Einsteins”, that the geniuses of past generations all had one thing in common: growing up with personal tutoring. He lays out the unpopular argument that the life conditions of aristocracy, where scaling was simply not a problem, had a pedagogy so superior that it shifted the average learning results by two standard deviations. Said otherwise, 98% of pupils who receive personal tutoring have better results than pupils of conventional schooling—likely because they can use their time more efficiently and engage in an active dialogue of learning with a knowledgeable teacher. Teaching, in such settings, is much better tailored to the individual pupil.
In other words, whatever sensitivities, critiques, and skills may emerge through educational research, philosophy and practical experience, these all face the problem of scaling; when they are scaled up and used in a wider frame, they lose precision and context-sensitivity; they lose sight of the singular learning individual—and the relations of that unique person.”
—Hanzi Freinacht
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| medium.com |
AI-Driven Learning; Big Data Ed-Tech; Modelling Reality
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