The notion that education needs to become more individualized is hardly new.
In the face of standardized tests and conventional systems of grading, this hardly seems like a point of debate. However something interesting has recently surfaced amid the commentary, and it has some well-substantiated and specific contributions to the debate on standardized education.
This idea is known as the science of the individual. The science of the individual is a branch of mathematics and psychology that demonstrates the flaws in drawing inferences about a single individual by simply taking a summary statistic for a population.
With the science of the individual, no single person is average in any real population of individuals.
At first this seems like a bit of a banal observation, and possibly even counterproductive. If we’re supposed to observe the atomic components of any system because conclusions are harder to form at higher organizational levels, we’ll wind up examining everything too closely to draw any meaningful conclusions at all.
This argument has merit — it often happens that the desire for objective accuracy gets bogged down in detail as we successively break the world around us down into more fundamental units.
In education, this would show if we obsessively tried to examine a child’s needs too closely.
Really, there is no such thing as a “perfect education,” and we’d likely end up with paradoxical notions as to what is best for any given child. In the end, we would have to strike a balance. The science of the individual is a step toward that balance; in today’s group-focused climate, it offers the insight that simply averaging across populations doesn’t give us the information we need to form curriculum that works for students.
In education this is all too apparent. It has, unfortunately, harshly run against the prevailing trends in standardized curriculum. Advocates of the science of the individual call for the end of this juxtaposition.
A strong leader in this movement is Todd Rose, author of “The End of Average” and a teacher of educational neuroscience at Harvard. He advocates specific methodologies, such as competency-based learning, which move us toward a more individualized take on education.
Rose and others advocating the science of the individual often reference a particular example of averages profoundly failing to account for individual differences. In the 1940s, jets were designed for the Air Force based on the average size of a pilot.
Pilots would lose control of their vessels at an alarming rate with this design. Upon examination of each individual, it was found that no individual was truly “average,” and thus the cockpit was not truly well-suited to a single pilot.
The solution was to make the cockpit seat orientation adjustable, so the pilots could fly in a way that suited them without costing much extra effort in the manufacture of planes.
This is the balance the science of the individual seeks to strike. It establishes sufficiently generalizable methodologies that allow us to reliably individualize education and other areas of human endeavor.
jacob.worrell@gmail.com
