This is an odd/strawman take. Personalized education in the form of tutoring is consistently the biggest intervention in education, don't have the definitive studies handy but there are many (here is one https://edworkingpapers.org/sites/default/files/ai20-267.pdf).

I would suspect almost nobody (Gates, Kahn, etc) suggest having an entirely asocial education experience.

As we can figure out how to replicate the effects of tutoring with technology, we should see massive improvements in education outcomes.

I think self-directed solo learning on a computer is how a lot of us ended up in the tech industry.

I was learning a heck of a lot more outside of school in the late 90's, teaching myself how to make websites, than I was learning inside of school.

I think all these billionaires are caught up in the idea that the next Einstein is wasting their time in traditional schools, mostly based on the billionaires memory that their time was wasted at school and their belief that they were geniuses whose time was wasted.

I was a smart, bookish kid with ADHD who was last in school decades ago. It seems like such hubris to even think I have any answers about how to fix the school system in 2023 let alone my personal experiences would have some bearing on optimal modern educational methods.

So yeah. Having all the children at same starting point and having a good teacher walk them through with great pedagogy is going to work. yes. and be social

What happens when kids don't get it that lesson, or that week. How do they catch up?

Personalised learning is much more "personalised catch up".

One thing that struck me recently on "The rest is politics" podcast is old Etonian Rory Stewart explaining that his (posh private) school he would get up about 8 and go to bed about ten and the whole day was full of structured learning / events. That (top) private schools might get better results simply because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on.

Perhaps the answer to school is simple - spend 2x to 3x more. we might not like it. But maybe it seemed ridiculous to pay for schools and books for Victorian children in Dickens' day as well

The concentration of wealth with the few is an abomination. It means that a few, with their idiosyncrasies are determining the future of the rest. Their biases are amplified instead of averaged out by the opinions of the many. It's not a harbinger of a sane society. And we're seeing the results everywhere. From the rise of the alright funded by the thiels and musks and putins. To the money burnt of useless educational startups.

"Rich people think thing that got them rich is good for everyone" should be a part of the zeitgeist by now. Individual attention and social learning doesn't "scale", so lets do the thing that does because "that's more efficient", the actual needs and desires of human beings be damned.

Somehow we forget that one of the most important aspects of learning is a clear understanding about why one does it and how it benefits us. This must be repeatedly reinforced over years, and close to zero people want that reinforcement in the hellish form of a gamified and entirely soulless piece of software.

Even taking the writers premise as true, it’s not scalable. Most teachers do not have the necessary capabilities, even with training, to run whole classroom engaged learning experiences. School is designed to meet the capabilities of teachers as much as it does the needs of students.

That said, most students don’t have the capacity to benefit from personalized learning either. The whole problem with the discussion of improving education is the assumption that a proper education process can increase the size of the “glass” by pouring in more “water.” Not everyone is capable of every type of thought, and that’s ok! Every type of person is valuable.

People who are unusually intelligent should be given free time to self teach, and if possible tutored. Traditional classrooms work well enough for everyone else, except for the drug issues.

I think there's a need to distinguish between childhood education and adult education, in that a main role of childhood education is to facilitate socialization, it's not just reading writing and arithmetic. This is why small class sizes are much more important in K-12 education than at the college level (although college discussion groups led by a TA can be very helpful).

Also, personalized learning lacks some of the motizational pressure that attending a class with other people at a specified time imposes. Some people are self-disciplined and get by without this, but having a schedule helps a lot of people stay focused on their goals.

Where personalized (nowadays, LLMs) tools are incredibly helpful is if you take a course that's a bit above your level and for which you lack some of the necessary background. With LLM assistance, you might have to work twice as hard as other students in the course to keep up, but you at least won't be totally lost.

However, the old saw about leading a horse to water still applies. All the technology and assistance in the world won't help the unmotivated student learn much. If the broader culture doesn't value education, that's the first obstacle to overcome.

What about all the tutorials online that have taught countless people countless skills? Did that just never happen?

If I understand, the core argument in this article is that there is a social layer of learning. And that's probably true to an extent, but how does that completely dismiss the value of self-directed learning?

Everyone here seems to have a valid perspective. 1. I now value personalization, especially after college when I grasped how continuous learning impacts my life. 2. I wouldn't have appreciated personalization before turning 21. I loved class rooms. 3. It's beneficial for billionaires to invest in philanthropy and gain exposure, but it's crucial to do due diligence when their actions can impact millions of lives.

I think the core issue where I strongly disagree with this article (and also what seems to be the disagreement why at least some tech billionaires have a completely different experience on education that leads them to finance such initiatives) is concentrated in the following paragraph of the article:

"I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms. That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging."

"I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms.": I do agree, but (for me) the reason is not the laptops, but the classroom.

"That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging.": Well, I felt alienated in school, and felt much more home hacking or on the internet (according to the HN comments to this article, this seems to be true for some tech billionaires, too)

I do not agree with this article at all. While I cannot speak for the service specifically, self learning is in my experience _the_ dividing factor between OK employees and great employees

Thus, investing in such a platform does not seem off to me.

Perhaps the problem is the mismatch between the class inherent composition (static, social but might be unequal) and the personal learning itself (inherently divers and dynamic). So instead of sitting in a static class, maybe the students should have their personal learning time, THEN convene per interests or social connections, for whatever they choose. This way, students will build themselves the social connections they wish.

Another problem might be just the stupid statistics. 75% of any population are just followers, who only differ minimally from each other in no significant way (more in appearance than substance). Thus, 75% don’t need much personal learning beside what traditional teachers can already provide. The rest 25% can benefit greatly from personal learning and teaching but either they already doing that in some forms or they don’t build enough mass for a wider adoption.

> Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal.

can, can

Can't the author say anything more definitive than can?

> Whole class work can feel personal. I consider it proven by Liz. QED.

This is transparently misleading. Anybody who has been in school knows that every school has a couple of gifted, charismatic teachers who can make just about anything feel exciting and compelling to students.

Name a learning methodology that can't feel personalized and stimulating if you find the teacher charismatic. I just proved everything works. QED.

This article is misguided, because it compares self learning with the presence of a good teacher. For all kinds of reasons, there are places in the world where a child might be much better off watching a Khan Academy lecture than their local teacher. And the personalized learning approach is easily scalable, whereas replicating good human teachers is extremely hard. It's not that Zuckerberg and Gates are dumb, it's that they are working on a different problem than this person assumes.

Imagine bloggers going on and on about you wasting a whopping 1 € on a lottery ticket.

The "misunderstanding" in question is so much more interesting than that silly "$100M" angle.

People who are capable of learning on their own pace are already doing it and the ones that can't use this approach shouldn't hope that a software system is going to allow them to. For me the questions of which professor explains better or the suggestions of not taking a course because the proffesor can't explain, were always meaningless. I never relied on a professor's lecture for learning (but had to sit through them) and my method was possible because engineering is not opinion based (Obviously I did terrible when the course was a amalgamation of different subjects from multiple books). But people who don't have the motivation to start reading a 1000 page textbook by themselves wouldn't have the will to watch 100h of videos around the same topic. In fact it might be even worse for them just watching the videos and not paying any attention.

My buttom line is personalized learning has existed for centuries and changing its medium from books to videos won't make it possible for more people.

The problem with tech people in education is that they can only think in paradigms that can "scale". If Zuck's mission was to "build a better school" and scale that out with better trained and incentivized teachers (the non-scaling part), the approach would be radically different.

Instead, the mission is to fix education as a whole and make it work for every person in the world. Which leads to looking in a complete different part of the solution space.

Often, what lacks in these ideas is nuance and middle ground. The intent is right but the approach is lazy.

What do you think of this approach:

Gamify learning! Students get to learn sort of at their own pace but like gaming, they fall into different levels. Let them compete and be ranked against others at their level nationally but also be in different teams of less than 10 students at their school. Allow them to be at different levels for different subjects and attend regular in person classes with kids in their team/level.

The grade system stays, you still need to pass all the subjects to progress a grade, it just might for example take a 17 year old 5 years to move to grade 8 from 7 and 1 year to finish highschool because they sucked at math in the 7th grade and it took them 4 years to reach grade 8 level and the 1year to focus on math for grades 9-12, because they finished every other subject at every level and grade.

They could pair up and talk with students, mentors, teachers across the country to get exposure and pursue their passions.

I am sorry but I am shocked at how unimaginative technologists are getting. It's like the disruptor mindset is dying off.

My sister worked at Summit Shasta in Daily City (south of SF) as a teacher and then administrator. I can say that the school itself was quite a success, with a lot of local, low income students getting into Berkley, Carnegie Mellon, etc.

Now did the CZI need to invest $100m to build that platform and could it scale, maybe not, but I wouldn't write the whole thing off as a failure.

I thought this was gonna be about the $100M given to Newark schools that just...disappeared. Soaked up by the bureaucratic sponge.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-educ...

This is a user experience research failure as it didn't consider how Students view and benefit from interactive group learning. A few billionaires who prefer being alone projected their own personal values into everyone else... and apparently their needs and concerns about learning aren't the same.

I'm not sold on the idea that this is an either/or scenario. Classroom-based instruction is critical, imho, for social development, but having personalized learning as an option for areas of struggle (or areas of excellence) that proceeds at your own pace has been helpful for me (as an adult).

Tankies getting mad when someone spends 0.1% of the annual public education budget to try something out.

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A common finding since it became feasible to estimate social network status is that a student's learning is split in half between the effort they personally put into learning (homework, showing up to class, etc) and their social network status (who they talk to, how many do they talk with, how frequently, etc). This should not come as a surprise as it's common knowledge, at least in stem, that you aren't going to solve the problems all by yourself, study groups help. What's wild about this is that I couldn't imagine Facebook plugs their employees into computers disconnected from others to complete their tasks. Why would you assume this would work for students?

Reminds me of a classic short story by none other than Isaac Asimov:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had

https://www.bartlettschools.org/pdf/TheFunTheyHad.pdf

People have been debating the utility and potential isolation of automated personalized learning from before we even had real computers!

Nice to hear from an actual teacher about education. Billionaires have the same issue as a lot of other people - they went to school once, had some beef with it, are now successful, and so they think they've got some insight. Its funny how we in the tech industry (rightly) bristle at some outsider like McKinsey claiming insight into our world but can't see the same hubris when we talk about education without any background or training in it. Well except - we went to school once.

>More students prefer learning in classes like Liz’s than plugged into their laptops with headphones, alone together. I have not proven this. It isn’t obvious to me how one would prove or disprove this, but I find evidence and experience pretty compelling here.

One month one way, one month the other way for an entire year. Have students vote and decide which one they actually like.

Personally addressing someone is not individually isolating content to their tastes.

Personally addressing someone is sculpting and interjecting/communicating with their subjective understanding of that topic.

The flat, objective heirarchy on the internet can never deliver it.

Well it can, but getting subjective structures into tech and tech teaching, is an uphill battle.

Reminds me of that Isaac Asimov story about being taught by a boring robot: "The Fun They Had"

I know absolutely nothing about "education reform". I knew this thing was a grift instantly when it was announced. Mark Zuckerberg teams up with Chris Christie. What could possibly go wrong?? So shocking that this doesn't work out!

Personally, I think that learning on one’s own outside of an educational institution is perfect for those with the self-discipline for it. For everyone else, a traditional school environment may be the better choice.

I notice that this author is focusing on what students prefer, whereas the cited examples were focusing on what is more effective for learning. They may or may not align.

Has it ever occurred to them that not everyone can learn alone at their own pace? Some people learn better alone others in groups as it acts as a pacemaker.

The math olympiad coaching style education. Write solution explain to tutor is probably the best.

Or .1% of his wealth.

Even if he lost this amount every month he'd take almost a century to get broke.

Often, what lacks in these ideas is nuance and middle ground. The intent is right but the approach is lazy.

What do you think of this approach:

Gamify learning! Students get to learn sort of at their own pace but like gaming, they fall into different levels

A quick search shows that Mark (I worked at FB where we were all encouraged to call him Mark instead of Zuck) has a net worth of ~$100 billion. So its basically a side bet. His real estate holdings are probably worth more.

They should have just donated it to the public school system

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