In Defense of Doing Things Together

Why schools should resist the atomisation of personalised learning.

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture a future in which children learn more from a screen than from a teacher. In truth, it barely qualifies as imagination at all. The machinery is already almost in place, replete with dashboards, adaptive pathways, mastery trackers, and confidence scores. As you read this, huge sums of money are being poured into greasing the cogs of machine-driven schooling.

The Seduction of Efficiency

The case for it is not weak. The computer can learn a child’s strengths and weaknesses. It remembers every error. It does not get impatient. It does not have a bad Tuesday. It can explain the same idea six different ways, notice misunderstanding almost immediately, and generate exactly the amount of practice required without sighing, improvising, or forgetting to put trousers in the rucksack and therefore teaching the day’s lessons in cycling shorts.

If one child is struggling with fractions, the software notices. It provides a targeted explanation, adaptive examples, and carefully sequenced practice. If Julio has already mastered fractions, there is no risk of him spending a cloudy Thursday afternoon putting Blu Tack in Beatrice’s hair while waiting for the teacher’s next move. It moves him on. If Hippolytus needs more time, Hippolytus gets additional examples, and the chances of him gouging a replica of the Cerne Abbas Giant with his protractor are thereby lessened, if not entirely eliminated. The inherent danger of nothing-to-do-ness is, in theory, eradicated.

So let us grant the strongest version of the argument. In one narrow but important sense, the children may indeed learn more mathematics in machine-school.

And that is precisely what makes the argument dangerous.

The trouble with every increase in efficiency is that it forces us, whether we admit it or not, to decide what we are willing to class as inefficiency. Once you start speaking the language of optimisation, certain human realities begin to look suspiciously like waste. Delay looks wasteful. Friction looks wasteful. Digression looks wasteful. Waiting for someone else to catch up looks wasteful. Listening to an explanation less elegant than the one the machine could have delivered looks wasteful. Even the ordinary social mess of being in a room with other minds can begin to look like a design flaw.

Imagine two classrooms.

In the first, a child sits alone with headphones, moving through perfectly matched problems at exactly the right level of challenge. Success is frequent, progress is visible, and no minute is lost. The line on the graph moves obediently upward, which means the director has something nicely measurable to show parents and board members.

In the second, ten children are wrestling with the same problem. Some understand it quickly. Others do not. One is stuck. One is frustrated. One thinks she has the answer but cannot yet explain why. Another is still loyally defending the view that three quarters must be bigger than five sixths because, after all, three is quite a lot and quarters sound substantial.

If our only concern were the most efficient acquisition of mathematical knowledge, the first classroom might well seem superior. And that is more or less the promise of personalised learning: let the individual child master core knowledge at the right pace, then use the time saved for projects, collaboration, and the development of broader human capacities.

But that division is precisely where I think something goes missing.

The issue is not whether children sometimes learn together. It is whether there is value in learning the same thing together. Whether it matters that they wrestle with the same mathematical problem, the same historical event, the same scientific idea, and in doing so come to see not only the thing itself, but how other minds are making sense of it.

What is lost is not merely sociability. It is the communal making of knowledge. It is the experience of discovering that understanding is not only something one possesses privately, but something worked out in public, among other people, through confusion, comparison, explanation, and disagreement.

Common Ground

Part of this comes about because we have spent decades reminding ourselves, quite rightly, that children differ in interests, abilities, backgrounds, aspirations, and experiences. All of that is true. It does not follow that the answer is to build twenty-five parallel little school systems, each calibrated to the preferences of its occupant, and then call the resulting solitude progress.

Why this poem?

Why this theorem?

Why this historical event?

Why these scientific concepts?

Why do we insist that children encounter Shakespeare, Pythagoras, photosynthesis, the Holocaust, plate tectonics, algebra, evolution, and democracy whether or not these happen to align with their present preferences, moods, or algorithmically inferred appetites?

If you will forgive the literary detour, this is from my favourite poem, *The Waste Land* by T. S. Eliot. The lines come in Part V, “What the Thunder Said”:

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

The answer to the question of why we educate cannot be utility alone. Coriolanus was fierce, brilliant, and proud, but his attempts to enter public life were undone by his inability, or unwillingness, to exchange the weapons of war for the softer furnishings of compromise.

Something similar haunts the fantasy that children might spend the day moving down their own intellectual tracks and then emerge, later on, as socially competent entrepreneurs. Each risks becoming sealed inside the certainty of their own competence. And yet what our age increasingly requires is the social intelligence to move over a little on the banks of reality, to make room for somebody else to look at the same thing with you, rather than spend all day trying to shove each other into the water.

That is one reason schools have always taught more than what is merely useful. Most adults do not spend much of their time solving simultaneous equations. Many never again discuss the causes of the English Civil War, unfortunately. We teach these things because they have been judged important enough to belong to a common inheritance, part of the shared furniture of an educated world.

Common Content creates Common Ground.

And common ground matters, not only culturally but cognitively. When twenty children study the same poem, they acquire more than the poem. They acquire a common stock of images and questions that can travel between minds. Understanding becomes less private and, very often, less silly.

That is why people join book clubs rather than sitting at home telling the radiator that Chapter Seven was rather moving. Meaning thickens when it is negotiated. The same is true in classrooms. A misconception becomes public, an explanation emerges, and the child who thought he alone was baffled discovers, with some relief, that confusion has been democratically distributed.

My son once asked whether I understood fractions. “Partially,” I said. Everyone groaned, as they should. But everyone got the joke because everyone was in the same conceptual room.

What Travels Between Minds

The advocate of personalised learning may say these are pleasant by-products, but secondary. Learn alone first, collaborate later. It sounds tidy. I am not convinced it is true.

Robin Alexander, Neil Mercer, and Michael Tomasello all point, in different ways, to the same fact: understanding often arrives in company. We do not merely absorb knowledge better when attention is shared; we become different kinds of thinkers. You learn intellectual courage not by producing finished answers, but by offering a half-formed thought, being wrong in public, and surviving the experience.

If you want the candlelit-seminar phrase, call it cognitive sovereignty: the ability to hold, test, revise, and finally own your own thinking. That grows badly in a world forever adjusting itself to your present preferences. A school can individualise itself into loneliness.

Against the For You Feed

Push the logic a little further and personalised learning begins to resemble the modern For You feed. Everything is tailored, friction is pared away, and the machine gets steadily better at supplying more of what already fits. The result is efficient. The cost is that fewer people are thinking about the same thing at the same time.

That matters because the opposite of shared meaning-making is not silence but algorithmic confirmation. Shared meaning over the same thing is one antidote to the For You feed. Some part of our goodness, I suspect, is found in shared truth-making: not truth as a private possession, but truth approached together, awkwardly, argumentatively, and with the full inconvenience of other people. Socrates, one imagines, did not spend his life wandering Athens so that future schools could conclude that the ideal education was one undertaken alone with headphones.

What Schools Are For

None of this is an argument against technology. Use it for practice, feedback, and access. Let it support the common life of the classroom. Just do not let it dissolve that life.

Schools should protect shared texts, shared questions, shared explanations, and shared struggles, not because these are always the fastest route to a tidy graph, but because efficiency is not the only thing education is for. The human in the chain is slower, messier, and rather more likely to forget his trousers. That inefficiency is not a design flaw. It is part of our humanity.