Four Reasons to Worry About "Personalized Learning"

Personalized Learning is something that may sound very important when first looking at the words. The blog I read today thinks differently. Personalized learning, in Alfie Kohn's opinion, is basically a market scheme. They do not actually personalize the learning. The disks and online materials are mass produced. Mass production and personalization are two very different things. This made me wonder, how personalized could these methods really be? Upon further reading, I was informed that they really are not and there are some good reasons why. The most important point, in my opinion, was the current method of delivery in the education system. The long quote below describes this climate much more accurately than I could have.

"In fact, the perceived need to personalize probably comes from this way of thinking about education in the first place. If the point is to dump a load of facts into children, then it may be necessary to adjust the style and rate of dumping – and to help teachers become more efficient at it. But if the point is to help kids understand ideas from the inside out and answer their own questions about the world, then what they’re doing is already personal (and varied). It doesn’t have to be artificially personalized."

Being as I only recently graduated high school, I am very familiar with the "dump and regurgitate method" (as I like to call it.) This widely used method makes teachers dump information on students, and makes students spit it right back out. If this is what these personalized programs are aiming to do, how are they at all personalized?

Just some food for thought. 

You can read this article here.