Against technology-mediated personalized learning: resources from John William Miller and Henry Bugbee to support parental resistance

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to provide parents and others resources to resist technology-mediated personalized learning. To develop these resources and make the case against technology-mediated  personalized learning, I turn to the work of American philosophers Henry Bugbee and John William Miller.

KEYWORDS:

• philosophy of education
• technology and education
• personalized learning
• John William Miller
• Henry Bugbee

Acknowledgments

The John William Miller Fellowship generously supported my research on Miller. I am tremendously grateful for that support, as I am appreciative of the feedback I received on this submission from Paul Smeyers and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this paper I will use technology-mediated personalized learning and personalized learning interchangeably, because though some teachers may be able to personalize learning without using technology, the problems I refer to are those that happen when the technology is doing the personalization. For an important early critique of the drive to personalization in education, see Jackson (1985).

2. Though well beyond the scope of this paper, an interesting story could be told about the influence of William Ernest Hocking on Miller and Bugbee. Miller wrote his dissertation with Hocking and Bugbee was a colleague of Hocking at Harvard. More, Hocking was an insightful critic of what he saw as the mistakes and excesses of progressive education, though he started, with his wife, Shady Hill, an experiential outdoors school in Cambridge that remains open today. Though I don’t tell this story here, and though I don’t do much to show why Miller and Bugbee are both concerned to examine personalized learning, I think exploring Hocking’s work might be the way to start.

3. For a contemporary, and related, discussion of risk in education, see Biesta (2016).

4. For a related discussion of how the desire to control the threat of skepticism can undermine an education, see Frank (2017a).

5. Though the focus on my discussion is the American context, many countries are struggling to justify the costs of education in terms of student outcomes as measured by things like preparation for work and contribution to GDP.

6. Though there are significant differences between Bugbee and John Dewey, on this point they are in agreement. As Dewey asserts throughout his writings on education, the quality of the educational present a student experiences will influence the quality of the outcomes of the education. For more on this point, see Frank (2019a).

7. For an excellent discussion, drawing on the work of Charles Taylor, of the role of articulation in education, see Brewer (2014).

8. For an excellent critique of this mimetic form of education, see Jackson (1986); for a recent discussion of that chapter, see Frank (2017b).

9. For an excellent reminder of what early childhood education can look like, see Diamond (2015).

10. For another good example of what early childhood education can look like, see Diamond (2008) or any of the wonderful books written by Vivian Paley (2005).

11. For a discussion, see Bowles (2019).

12. This is not to claim that students should be given material that is too difficult or disconnected from their interests. The point is that it is often impossible to tell in advance what will call forth a child’s passionate interest.

13. The introduction to this essay states that it was written in 1933 or 1934.

14. For examples, see: powell (2012), Allen (2016), Frenk (2016), Yoshino (2007). This is just a small sample of strong work on this very important topic.

15. For a discussion of presence in education, with specific reference to John William Miller, see Frank (2019b).

16. For discussions of resistance, see Frank (2018) and Norlock (2019). For an excellent discussion that connects resistance to thinking about the aims of education, see Harðarson (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John William Miller Fellowship Fund [2018–2019].