Personalization: Intention,Efficiency and The Good
To personalize means to accommodate to the here-and-now nature of a person*. When giving greetings on the street I accommodate byadjusting my greeting or conversation to the nature of each individual I meet on the street.
*It means more, too. But first I will define
accommodation, which is a major part of personalization. Then I will add the final aspect that crucially distinquishes the moral worthiness of personalization from the moral neutrality of its component accommodation.
It may seem obvious but accommodation is not in itself doing good. A thief or assassin can accommodate in the process of doing evil to a person. To accommodate means, in short, to adjust to a person’s nature in order to better accomplish ones aim’s in acting. Thus, the actor is tailoring her actions in order to better accomplish her desired results.—whether the desire is for good or not.
Accommodative instruction is not necessarily aimed at a good thing. Instruction which is accommodative is aimed at change in an individual’s actions, i.e., learning. When accommodation occurs instruction actually achieves its aim — the student who couldn’t do something can now do it.
Efficient and accommodative instruction produces the same result with the least amount of teacher and learner effort. Personalized instruction is accommodative and, within that frame
efficient as well
So, where are we re personalized instruction?
We aren’t yet to the point of satisfactorily defining or explaining what I consider to be the ethical nature of personalized instruction.
Why? Because, so far, we are talking in ethics-free terms. Efficiency is not an ethical concept. — at least not directly. This efficiency, while conserving resources (time, money, energy) may allow the achievement of a morally worthy end that would not otherwise have been completed. However, we need to also realize that efficiency could just as easily allow the completion of an evil end that would not have otherwise been accomplished. In short—accommodation and its included efficiency is morally neutral.
And—ethics applies in the continuum between Good and Bad.
My quandry: I’ve worked my way towards defining personalized instruction — and , here we are, personalized instruction looks to be effective and efficient but, to this point I have ve set the stage so it appears to be morally neutral. To put it dramatically: The trainer of assassins can deliver training efficiently and effectively by accommodative teaching. The teacher of reading can deliver reading skills by accommodative instructional processes. So, personalized teaching is morally neutral?!!
So far it is!!
It is not that being an effective and efficient teacher is not “good”. Any teacher will probably be happier being effective and efficient than if s/he can be described to be less than "average" in this dimension. Why—because more learning lies in the direction of effective and efficient. More students have learned more. More students learning more: this is Good!!!
Right?
To further confuse the issue: there will probably be more students who will, by reason of learning what it is clearly intended that they learn, be happier and be developing a “better self concept” (“I CAN learn”, “I got an A”, and so on) than with a teacher of the same content who is neither effective nor efficient. So, everything else held constant, efficiency can serve good ends. But, now that we’ve agreed that “efficiency can help” and that “efficiency is, in and of itself, morally neutral” … we can move on to that part of my definition of personalization that is a good in and of itself.
What part is that?
It is the part where we make our teaching technique serve the unique becoming of each student. It is the learning that results when the teacher encourages and enables the student to take progressive learning steps — each of which moves the student closer to a realization his/her “authentic” self.
Martin Buber might have referred to this as “Thou”ing the student. Accepting and understanding the student’s whole self/deep self for what it is (actuality)and at the same time embracing what it could be (potentiality). The teacher, parent and any who love the individual share this. The teacher and parent (in their ideal form— as I believe Buber envisions them) share the deep impulse to nurture the becoming of the learner, or, in other words, to help the learner find and progressively translate that for which s/he has potential into that which an s/he actually does within an appropriate context.
