Chapter 6: Making Personalized Learning Stick: Using The Child-Centered Schools to Criticize and Bolster Personalized Learning

At nearly every turn, I’m told that personalized learning is the next new thing in education, even that it is the next iteration of education. Personalized learning is exciting, and in many ways, seemingly intuitive. Of course students’ learning should be at the center of education. Of course we should be meeting the needs of our individual students. Of course students shouldn’t be hindered by a standardized curriculum in an age where they hold powerful computers in their pockets. Recently there was an entire edition of Educational Leadership devoted to personalized learning. My own school district has listed on its goals the implementation of personalized learning over the next 5 to 10 years. Coincidentally, I picked up The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education by Harold Rugg and Ann Shumaker (1928) for my graduate program around the same time I was reading Learning Personalized: The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom by Alison Zmuda, Greg Curtis, and Diane Ullman (2015) for my school district. The relevance of Rugg and Shumaker’s work was simultaneously thrilling and disheartening. How is it that this book published in 1928 with rich discussion and visions for curriculum, student choice, and child-centered education has not only failed to revolutionize our school systems but appears to chronicle the same journey on which I’m embarking with my school district almost 100 years later?