Personalized learning through AI tutors is touted a lot by ed-tech proponents.
But is anyone buying what they are selling?
‘The Real Problem Isn’t Technical’
Michael Pershan is a math teacher who writes about teaching at pershmail.substack.com:
A decade ago, Bill Gates invested half a billion dollars to promote personalized learning—the use of technology to individualize instruction for students. He could surely have hired a team of world-class tutors to educate his two daughters. But Phoebe and Jennifer Gates, now both adults, instead attended Seattle’s Lakeside School, the same school Bill himself attended.
It’s not just the Gates family. The world’s wealthiest families hire assistants, nannies, coaches, chefs, trainers, and (of course) tutors, all while sending their kids to schools where children learn the conventional curriculum surrounded by peers.
What gives? Why not hire world-class tutors and avoid school entirely?
The answer is: They don’t want that.
The dream of tech-enabled personalization goes back at least a century. The usual history is that this vision has been failed by imperfect technology. This is a hopeful narrative; if technology is the problem, better technology is the answer.
Meanwhile, human tutors could easily provide what neuroscientist Erik Hoel calls “aristocratic tutoring.” But most wealthy parents have stubbornly insisted on sending their children to conventional private schools, and relatively few of them opt entirely for one-on-one instruction.
Listen, I’m a math teacher. I’m not going to stand here and tell you how great school is, that everybody loves it. But there are certain facts that need to be mentioned.
First, unlike tech advocates, parents aren’t particularly interested in pushing children toward greater learning feats. The ability of tutors, human or digital, to help students learn more than is currently expected isn’t broadly appealing.
If it were, we’d be teaching through the summers, squeezing out more academic gains. Joe Liemandt of Alpha School, which claims its tech can double the speed of learning, says “only 10% of parents care about outstanding academic outcomes.” The vast majority of parents simply aren’t animated by the possibility of their 8th grader taking calculus. (Alpha instead shifted toward selling the minimization of academics to parents—that they can finish quickly and move on to other, more interesting things. It’s yet to be seen if this argument will be more successful in attracting enrollment and finding success in the public education “market.”)
Second, most parents see the social aspects of schooling as attractive. I include myself here. Come time for parent-teacher conferences, I’m interested in how my kids are interacting with others: Are they taking school seriously? Are they respectful to their teachers? Are they making friends and acting appropriately? The social nature of schooling of course has downsides. It can push cultural homogeneity, and school can at times be oppressive. But for most, the social nature of school is appealing. This is surely why Mark Zuckerberg, instead of hiring tutors, created a small private school in his own home that other children attended (even if it turned out he had run afoul of city code).
Skeptics of individualized learning often point to the remarkable stability of personalization rhetoric. It’s possible to find quotes from 1920 that could easily be attributed to tech CEOs today. Partly this is because the challenges are seen as technological. The failures of RocketShip, School of One, AltSchool, Summit, and Khan Academy’s Khanmigo to have the dramatic impacts on education they hoped to achieve are only signs of an unsolved engineering problem—how to make software that’s as engaging and intelligent as a human.
But the real problem isn’t technical. It’s that the dream of personalized instruction is fundamentally unpopular. Even with perfect technology—and current tech is very far from perfect—its appeal has a limit. Simply put, most people prefer social learning. Which isn’t to say that Silicon Valley won’t succeed at thrusting this revolution on us—just if they do, it might leave many of us very unhappy.
Thanks to Michael for contributing his thoughts.
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