Deborah Meier Takes Aim

The Boston Review has an excellent round-table forum of essays on the topic, "What Is Education For?" It's a fundamental question that the ed sector spends too little time considering. Deborah Meier doesn't hold back in the conclusion to her contribution:

Our current educational paradigm has lost more than the civic agency that every citizen needs in a democracy: it barely recognizes, in the most fundamental sense, what being a person is about. I watch in horror as schools adopt a new fad erroneously called personalized learning, which involves no human contact, no mind connecting with another mind, no back-and-forth—no empathy, curiosity, or questioning of authority. Instead, students interact with software and digital devices tailored to their individual “performance.” There is nothing personal about it, just two machines hooking into each other, one of them a child.