What is Personalization?

Abstract

IN THE long history of formal education, schooling has rarely been personalized. It would be easy to compile a long list of famous individuals from the past who have been expelled from schools for their purported inability to learn. It is interesting to speculate whether such notably creative people as Charles Darwin, Patrick Henry, James Russell Lowell, Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Sir Walter Scott, and Daniel Webster were actually advantaged by being pushed out of the schools of their time. In more recent years, Madame Curie, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein, and Marlon Brando shared their fate. But a truly personalized school would be able to recognize such budding genius. Indeed, it would be able to diagnose and support the whole range of human talents. A personalized school is one in which each individual person, whether student or teacher, matters a great deal and has a program that is good for him or her. It was probably excusable for educators of Horace Mann's time to structure their schools on the assumption that all students learn in the same way and need precisely the same content. However, we are now faced with the enormous task of educating for a post-technological age. Today's schools must increasingly produce adaptable individuals who are lifelong learners and able to keep pace with the era of rapid change in which we will continue to live. The task of creating, maintaining, and improving the conditions for learning is thus the most basic challenge facing educators today. The outmoded structures that have encumbered schools for over a century must be replaced with more personalized ways of educating students and categorizing subject matter. Human knowledge is expanding at an alarming rate. Technology and computerization have drastically altered the ways in which we earn a living. Social, political, and economic problems of unprecedented complexity face everyone on the planet. Schools can no longer be satisfied with organizing themselves primarily for administrative convenience. They must become schools for learning rather than schools for teaching and testing. The conventional age-graded school system is a product of another century and initially of another culture. It was devised by the Prussians to prepare young people for a militaristic society, one in which authoritarianism was the dominant style. The system was imported into the U.S. at the Quincy Grammar School in Boston in 1848 and grew as population increases necessitated accommodating larger numbers of students. It has endured principally because it is easy to administer and neatly categorizes students and curriculum by age and subject. We are faced with an equally large transition today from arbitrary grouping patterns to personalized learning alternatives. Unfortunately, we are also currently blessed with policy makers who believe they can solve all educational problems by testing. What we require are new models for a new kind of schooling. And we need to avoid the pitfalls of earlier decades when we successively concentrated on new curricula utilizing old teaching techniques or old content using new structures. THE PERSONALIZATION PREMISE Contemporary schools must acknowledge the validity of the personalization premise. They must accept the biological truth that no two organisms are alike, and that includes learners. Every learner has a unique experiential background and a unique set of innate talents and personal interests. No two learners exhibit the same behavioral patterns or possess the same goals or levels of aspiration. No two learners solve problems in the same way or are motivated by the same incentives. No two learners are ready to learn at the same time or to the same degree. Learning for each individual is, at least to some extent, unique. The personalization of teaching and learning refers to any effort on the part of a school to suit its program to its student body. …