Personalized Conformity
Something to be said for a mostly bad idea
Bill Gates advocates personalized learning. So does Mark Zuckerberg and an initiative called AltSchool. But what these and other reformers call “personalized learning” others of us would be inclined to label something more like “personalized conformity.”
Yes, that sounds like an oxymoron. And it is. But it also is real.
Aldous Huxley foresaw this paradox of technocratic socialization in Brave New World:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated. Then, turning to him, “Oh, do let’s go back, Bernard,” she besought; “I do so hate it here.”
So there is that sinister side to personalized conformity — that freedom to find your own, individual way to be like everyone else.
And yet, I’m inclined to concede that there still is something to be said for it. As un-revolutionary as it is, it is a significant improvement on the status quo. It might even be sufficiently destabilizing to help unleash real disruption.
Here’s why…
What bothers many of us who view learning as liberation is that the Silicon Valley notion of personalized learning is shackled to the same old standardized curriculum: what the elite poobahs have decided everyone must know, as measured by the “common core” tests defined by them.
But if Gates’ notion of agency were consistently applied to its logical conclusion, every student should get an “A” in every “course” on every “subject.” This is a real improvement, because it eradicates the stigma of failure.
I suggest however that that really leads to a reductio ad absurdum — from the viewpoint of the academic-bureaucratic establishment. I explained this further in another essay on why open online courses are not by themselves really a disruptive innovation. At a time when technology can make knowledge ever more abundant and accessible, the academic-bureaucratic complex must strive to make knowledge scarce in order to survive:
…the academic-bureaucratic complex strives to protect the cult of the expert and to sequester knowledge in academic compartments and bureaucratic stovepipes. A few of the myriad ways it does so include:
- Make diplomas a necessary ticket to employment. Raise tuition and other costs to keep diplomas scarce.
- Identify institutional prestige with exclusivity.
- Make elite diplomas from elite institutions necessary tickets to elite employment.
- Create competition for admission to elite preschools, to get into elite grade schools, to get into elite high schools, to get into elite colleges, and so on.
Further, create credential and other barriers to limit who gets to teach, who gets to do research, who gets to publish, who gets access to data and publications, and who gets elected to the professional clubs and appointed to the bureaucratic posts that control these valves and turnstiles.
It should be evident that equality of outcomes would gravely undermine this architecture of academic-bureaucratic elitism. The last thing those who pay high taxes and steep tuition for academic “excellence” want is to become denizens of Lake Wobegon where “all of the children are above average.”
So Gates, Zuckerberg, and their cronies are playing a can’t-win game. If their version of personalized conformity actually were to achieve equality of results, it would destroy — or be destroyed by — the very standard-setting apparatus it courts. And if (really, when) it fails to achieve equality of standardized outcomes, then it will simply be viewed as a failure.
So in the context of school reform, Gates’ notion of personalized instruction is bound to be just one more in a long string of barren initiatives.
But in the context of what often is derogatorily classed as “training,” that sort of personalization is a significant improvement over the traditional, stifling classroom approach. If you want to learn how to speak French or write Python code to a sufficient level of proficiency to accomplish a useful result — useful to you that is — learning in a mode that is most efficient, comfortable, and productive for your individual needs is far preferable to merely accumulating classroom credit-hours.
Generally the best way to do that will involve learning-by-doing the thing you want to master, with diverse knowledge resources — demos, tutorials, simulations, images, data, facts, stories, advice, even just observing others perform — accessible just when and where needed to apply in practice. Then the outcome is demonstrated by performance of the thing to be learned, not by filling in bubbles on a standardized test.
There is nothing new or revolutionary about that sort of personalized learning. It is what most humans normally do from birth through the early years of life — when they are left blissfully free of schooling. Indeed, it is what humans of all ages did for thousands of years before school was ever invented.
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Copyright 2016, Lewis J. Perelman.
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