Everybody learns differently, so why do schools still use a “one-size fits all” model?

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This blog post is in collaboration with Neuropsyched, an online e-magazine whose goal is to bring together a community of brain scientists and brain science enthusiasts. The article is originally hosted here and was edited by my colleague Fiza Arshad.

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"We are raised in a school system that penalizes us for being wrong."

- Ki-Youn Kim, science communicator

You have likely heard the old adage “...if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid”, famously said by the resident-genius himself, Albert Einstein. If this is the case, then why do schools continue with the “one-size fits all” mentality of education?

While there is some debate around the roots of the modern education system (“modern” meaning the past two hundred years), one thought remains the same: asking students to sit in a classroom all day learning from a board and textbook no longer reflects the realities of diverse learning needs. School as it is set up today came to be during the industrial revolution; the agglomeration of children into one room mimicked factories, thus teaching children how to be productive contributors to society once they became adults.

This institutionalization of education became commonplace before we could realize or come to terms with the fact that people have different learning needs and interests. Individual learning styles differ massively between neurotypical folks, including but not limited to aural learning (through hearing), physical learning (doing hands-on activities), verbal (teaching it to others), and so on. To build onto this, adding in pathologized/neurodivergent learning difficulties adds a whole other dimension of complexity. In addition to learning difficulties, people with mental health disorders, such as bipolar disorder, anxiety (which may be both a cause of and a result of educational institutions), depression, schizophrenia, to name a few, may have a harder time learning than their peers due to their psychiatric symptoms. The traditional classroom model is an uneven playing field right from the get-go, which is in direct contrast to the basic human right of equal access to education.

The exercise of absorbing vast amounts of knowledge before regurgitating factual information onto an exam, and promptly forgetting it, is drilled into us from the start. We are lectured, complete practice sets, and then write exams, which provides us with numeric measures of our understanding. Instead of going back and assuring that the student understands the X% they missed on the exam, the whole class moves forward and the mentality of “I must do better next time or else I’ll fail” persists. This schematic is especially prevalent in high school and post-secondary education where class sizes are large and there is an intense time-crunch.

Some attempts have tried to curb this epidemic. For example, John Dewey, who is considered the “rock star of modern education” proposed a more child-centric, hands-on approach where students experience subject material rather than being taught in a formal classroom setting. In his model, pupils and instructors learn and grow together, subject material is more interdisciplinary, and students are freer to pursue their interests in a way that is more conducive to their personal learning. For example, while one student might have a better grasp of understanding grouping numbers via long division, another may need access to physical manipulatives in order to understand how numbers divide. Both learning styles are equally valid and both students need to be supported on an individual-basis rather than a one blanket method being used for all students. While we see aspects of this in modern classrooms, the practice has not been completely adopted.

This issue becomes especially obvious once students exit traditional schooling, including undergraduate degrees, and enter the working world or even postgraduate education. The tried-and-true method of sitting in place and accurately regurgitating information in exchange for an A is replaced with situations where we must muddle through trial and error to attain desirable outcomes. But we have not yet been taught how to be independent, critical thinkers! It feels impossible to try new things because we have a learned fear of failure. As Ki-Youn Kim said, we are “raised in a school system that penalizes us for being wrong”, so it seems logical that it is difficult to step out of one’s personal comfort zone and take risks in order to participate fully in a new experience.

As a society, we are continuously moving away from the factory worker drone mentality into industries that reward innovation and risk taking. So why isn’t the school system educating future employees to reflect this new reality?