In the international school world, "personalised learning" is the golden ticket. Every student gets a curriculum tailored to their pace and ability. With AI, this is now possible. But lately, as I watch my students in Shanghai each plug into their own individualised learning pathways, I've started to wonder if we're accidentally destroying the community that makes a school a school.
Two sides, both half right
The Silicon Valley types think education is just a series of skills to be unlocked. The traditionalists think there's a core body of knowledge everyone should learn together. Efficiency versus cohesion. Individual mastery versus shared culture.
The polite consensus says we can have both through blended learning. As long as the outcomes are good, the social fragmentation doesn't matter.
But it does. If children grow up only ever learning at their own pace and according to their own interests, are we preparing them for a world that demands compromise? I worry we're training children to be consumers of content rather than members of a society. We're treating education like a personal gym membership instead of a shared foundation.
Personalise skills, not culture
Personalisation is brilliant for skills. It's a disaster for culture.
We should use AI to personalise things like maths drills — the mechanical stuff. But we should never personalise the humanities. A class should read the same book, look at the same history, debate the same ideas. We need to preserve the classroom as a place of shared gravity.
Kindness in teaching isn't just about meeting a child where they are. It's about inviting them into a world they didn't know existed.
Skills versus soul
In an average classroom, a third of the kids are bored and a third are lost. For things like coding or arithmetic, that's a waste of life. Personalisation is a dream here. The struggling student gets practice without embarrassment. The advanced student gets harder problems. Everyone wins.
But imagine a history lesson where every student reads a different article tailored to their interest. You'd have thirty individuals and no class. Education isn't just about learning things. It's about learning to be part of an us. If we don't all struggle with the same difficult text together — whether it's Hamlet or a news report — we lose the shared frame of reference that lets us be a community.
What I'd suggest
If you're a parent or a teacher, try to draw a clear line.
Personalise the tools. Use adaptive platforms for drills — maths, languages, vocab. This is where the machine wins.
Standardise the ideas. Keep the whole-class novel and the group science project. Force the kids to engage with the same material at the same time.
Bring back the debate. The most personalised thing you can do for a student is listen to their individual opinion about a shared problem.
Don't let the tech gurus convince you that a room full of children with headphones on is a modern classroom. It's a call centre. Keep the personalised pathways for home. Keep the classroom for the shared, messy work of learning together.