What School Should Be: On Personalization

I want my kids to attend a school where the principal or headmaster knows every student by name.

Computers cannot make learning personal. In fact, the more advanced the algorithm or AI, the more starkly impersonal learning feels. Each student devolves into a series of data points on a curriculum map, instead of, say, a rumple-headed, freckle-faced boy with a passion for dinosaurs, an aversion to the color orange, and a distracting crush on the girl two rows over.

Personalized learning is named learning. It is Terrance and Cynthia and Solomon and Quinn, not Student IDs, AYP, LMSs, and RTI programs. I want—I expect—the leader of my child’s school to know his or her name. I want that leader greeting my child by name in the morning car line and in the hallway before lunch. I want that principal to shake my child’s hand for making the honor roll or for medaling at the conference track meet. When my child screws up, I want the principal to administer discipline in the context of personal knowledge, not in the rote application of standard procedure.