issue51 the individualization of education

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Education will be truly effective only when it is specifically designed to meet the individual needs and interests of each student.”




Education, in the largest sense defined as the impartation of knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another, has long history. Before the renaissance children were deemed as the miniature of adults and need to learn all the knowledge designed for them regardless of their own interest and acceptance capability. However, with the arising of Humanism, the role of teachers transferred from instructors to facilitators, the schools were deemed as a place for students’ thriving rather than surviving. Educators began to pay increasingly attention to students’ characters and interests so that they can give individualized education to everyone.
This reversion in education philosophy is easily to understand partly because of people’s awaken emphasis in the role of students’ study motivation. Interest is the best teacher. And the disservice of ignoring students’ needs is obvious only if one takes a quick exam at china’s current education system.. Here and there are students, varying from pupils to undergraduates , who lead a boring life from the classroom to dormitory, carrying monstrous book bags, hardly daring to smile without bearing in mind the requirements of high grades. Piercing crys penetrate the dark campus, releasing students’ anxiety and depressue. We never get any idear about why we need to stuff our minds with all these knowledge, just knowing that this is the only way to success. Schools become a living hell where students’ have to suppress their own hobbies to meet the demands of teachers. It has been reported that the majority of young winners in the International Olympic Math Competiton choose to do something else other than math in their future career because they find math “disgusting”. Is it a tragedy that we finally cultivated elites but stripped them of passion and love?
Facing this grim educational scene, the belief of individualized education come into being. Meanwhile ,another factor accounting for this irreversible trend is the development of cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. Cognitive psychologists have confirmed that the key point of whether an individual can understand or remember certain new information lies in one’s original cognitive schema, that is the so called “mind map”, or the old knowledge structure, which is easily to understand for we can’t give college textbooks to children or ask pupils to read Kant. And every one knows that meaningful memory is usually more effective compared with rote. This is especially important when concerned with primary education. Just as the experiment of Gessel, a pioneer in child psychology, points out that training has to give proper consideration to children’s physical maturity degree, or it will be a waste of time.
Admittedly, individualization mode of education requires large amounts of instructors and demands much from them. What’s more, the assessment of education effect will be hard to execute. Standard exams will be useless out of the presumption that each student’s previous stage is different. Though thoroughly individualized education seems like a utopia, we can still give proper consideration to a group of students with similar interest and knowledge structure. What’s more , with the application of new technology in teaching and learning, this dream seems not out of reach.