Your critique in "Schooling Alone" strikes at a profound truth: hyper-personalized education risks reducing a deeply human, communal journey into a data silo. It also refutes the Hippocratic cornerstone of an AI-infested social media teacher-buddy: "Thou shall mount no challenge to thy view of the world." As we witness in your remarks, Rob, true education doesn't just build isolated, individual skills. It weaves the external identities we share as citizens, parents, and neighbors, ensuring that the act of learning remains firmly anchored in the community it is meant to serve.
Beautifully said. I gave a speech to a group of college students a few years ago that mentions some of the same ideas (https://mattspivey.substack.com/p/theory-of-generational-distancing) and built a whole course for parents and teachers to help guide their kids through a history and reclamation of our shared culture, called "The American Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Shape our Nation" (https://www.english-champion.com/course-americanmind) if anyone reading here wants to extend these values further. I hope the kids in that audience keep your speech in their hearts and minds for many years to come.
Inspiring! You say: "We’ve asked teachers to differentiate instruction, to tailor learning to each student’s needs, interests, and pace. We’ve emphasized personalization. We’ve tried to make learning more relevant, more engaging, more responsive."
Take comfort that Timothy Shanahan has made a compelling case for teaching the same grade-level text to all students--scaffolding the instruction, not separating it. It works!
I wonder if your talk didn't conflate experiencing the same content with experiencing it at the same time as others. Personalization in education can mean many things. One way to personalize is to focus teaching on what each student is prepared to learn but with a single curriculum. Students may learn at different rates, but still learn the same basic stuff. Dialogue is valuable, and this form of personalization might result in dialogue with only a few students who happen to be learning the same material at the same time, but valuable dialogue does not need to include the entire class. I think it would be helpful to separate learning the same material from learning it at the same time.
Your critique in "Schooling Alone" strikes at a profound truth: hyper-personalized education risks reducing a deeply human, communal journey into a data silo. It also refutes the Hippocratic cornerstone of an AI-infested social media teacher-buddy: "Thou shall mount no challenge to thy view of the world." As we witness in your remarks, Rob, true education doesn't just build isolated, individual skills. It weaves the external identities we share as citizens, parents, and neighbors, ensuring that the act of learning remains firmly anchored in the community it is meant to serve.
Beautifully said. I gave a speech to a group of college students a few years ago that mentions some of the same ideas (https://mattspivey.substack.com/p/theory-of-generational-distancing) and built a whole course for parents and teachers to help guide their kids through a history and reclamation of our shared culture, called "The American Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Shape our Nation" (https://www.english-champion.com/course-americanmind) if anyone reading here wants to extend these values further. I hope the kids in that audience keep your speech in their hearts and minds for many years to come.
Thanks so much for this wonderful article, so helpful for all of us who are working to build civic unity in our common world.!!!!
Inspiring! You say: "We’ve asked teachers to differentiate instruction, to tailor learning to each student’s needs, interests, and pace. We’ve emphasized personalization. We’ve tried to make learning more relevant, more engaging, more responsive."
Take comfort that Timothy Shanahan has made a compelling case for teaching the same grade-level text to all students--scaffolding the instruction, not separating it. It works!
Brilliant !
I wonder if your talk didn't conflate experiencing the same content with experiencing it at the same time as others. Personalization in education can mean many things. One way to personalize is to focus teaching on what each student is prepared to learn but with a single curriculum. Students may learn at different rates, but still learn the same basic stuff. Dialogue is valuable, and this form of personalization might result in dialogue with only a few students who happen to be learning the same material at the same time, but valuable dialogue does not need to include the entire class. I think it would be helpful to separate learning the same material from learning it at the same time.
Has anyone visited DC Latin? I’m interested to know about the growth of these charter schools in the DC area. https://latinpcs.org/
BRAVO!