Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for EdSurge, Randy Weiner explains that the need to find a humanizing focus in education supersedes the need to personalize education.

· How can education find a humanizing focus and avoid wasting value time? How can schools humanize a child’s education?

 · Read more about humanizing education and personalizing learning.

Over the last ten years, my privilege has allowed me to participate in a number of educational arenas. I’ve co-founded both a charter school and an education technology company, and I provide consulting and coaching support to schools and leaders related to personalized learning.

In any given week, I’m actively engaged in trying to deepen my own knowledge, support the growth of others’ knowledge and internalize a wide range of diverse perspectives on how we can best serve children via more personalized learning. But “more” might not be the solution we need right now. Lately, I’ve felt that for all our good intentions, we’re missing the larger point. We’re not seeing the persons in personalized learning.

In the lead up to this year’s SXSW EDU, I found myself reading about how personalized learning would be addressed at the conference and experienced a visceral sense of nausea. The dis-ease I felt in the pit of my stomach stemmed from struggling to digest ongoing, well-intentioned guidance on how to better implement personalized learning at a time when hate crimes have increased year-over-year for each of the last four years.

Privileged folks, myself included, may need to hit the pause button on personalized learning, at least for the moment. Although I do not question the value of seeking to better understand and practice personalized learning, I also submit that we may be doing little more than tinkering around the edges of changing students’ lives at a time when our country may be doing more to visibly de-humanize our most vulnerable children than it has over the last 20 to 30 years.

Read the full article about humanizing education by Randy Weiner at EdSurge.