The power of individualized education

"Learning is not memorizing something. Learning is being able to create something in your mind from scratch.”

Celal Şengör

Individualized Education is considered one of the most widespread educational methods in the world. The real conditions of the pandemic were perhaps the most opportune time to define and reflect on our experimentation with the transition to individualized education. Josh Kaufman's book, “The Personal MBA: Business Lessons”, goes into great detail. The book, which is the desk book of the world's leading business people today, contains interesting research on the secrets of individualized education.

Intellectual Ayzek Azimov wrote that real education is personal education. We also need to expand the reach of individualized and virtual education. By increasing our efforts in both individualized and virtual education, we can emerge from this stage with perhaps even greater gains. Because crises are not always a loss for everyone, but also an opportunity for future development.

The pandemic has made social isolation a necessity. People have largely lost the opportunity to learn through live contact at a collective pace. Secondary schools remained almost closed with episodic exceptions. Higher education institutions were closed to education workers for exactly 1 year. True, virtual education has relatively filled this gap. But in the general context, distance education and virtual education have entered a qualitatively new level. The new reality required a flexible and adequate response from the educational community. To what extent they tried to adapt to it, this is a conversation of another topic. But the bottom line is that various initiatives have failed to replace the traditional education system.

As an educator, my conclusion for one year is that virtual educational opportunities do not allow us to hear the feelings and excitement of the student in front of us, understand his/her thoughts, get information from his/her body language, and most importantly, cannot completely replace interactivity.

It is true that what matters is the content of the knowledge you want to impart to the learners. It is the value system you instill in them. The most important thing is to achieve their formation as a personality and increase their thinking ability. At the time, Socrates told teachers: "Don't teach your students anything, shape how to think in them. Because if they can think, then they will be able to learn through their own efforts. The knowledge learned as a result of one's own efforts is the most permanent knowledge. It will never be erased."

A large number of students who lack the ability to think is not the success of the education system. You will open many higher education institutions, and access to education will become easier. Diploma accessibility will be provided. But our dream far from quality education will remain a dream. As they say; we built a bridge, but no one crossed, we built a school, but no one studied.

Alfred von Tirpitz played a very important role in World War I as the head of the German Navy. He noted in his letter to the German Emperor: “The main problem of our higher schools (meaning gymnasiums and universities) is the abundance of incentives created artificially by educational institutions, which encourage admission to higher schools, and the resulting excess of students. As a result, we have more educated young people than we need and we can financially support them. Too many young people are studying in our higher schools who want to have an intellectual art form, even though neither their individual abilities nor their parents' origins are suitable. The result is the overflowing of universities and the emergence of a scholarly proletariat that is a threat to the state. Therefore, another layer is added to the mentioned class - "incomplete education".”

The people who have dropped out of school are better than those with incomplete education. There are hundreds of examples of this in the world. Steve Jobs sacrificed education for business activities. He replaced the university auditorium with a heart-wrenching garage. He left the university in 1973. Three years later, he founded Apple. The company founded in a car garage is today the most valuable technology company in the world.

The business strategy of Henry Ford, who is considered one of the great rich men of the 20th century, is magnificent. One can only admire the details of the implementation of his business ideas. Not only the business sphere but also his views on a large number of important issues related to democracy, education, and human morality outside of business are interesting. When I was working as a scientific editor (specialist consultant) of the translation of H. Ford's book "My Life and Work" into Azerbaijani, his thoughts on education on page 418 of the book caught my attention: "An educated person is not one who can remember a few facts of history, but a person who can achieve something. The purpose of education is not to fill one's mind with facts. The purpose of education is to teach a person to use his thinking.

In my opinion, neither virtual nor face-to-face, live education is the solution to all problems. Perhaps someday, even without being collective, the transition to individual education can grow to incredible proportions. I am one of those who believe that individual education will become more relevant in the near future. It is confirmed once again that the quality of education is more related to its adoption and cognitive processes than direct and indirect contact opportunities of teaching systems. Wherever you can teach science, wherever you can give education, regardless of its methods, it is an educational institution. One of the wise people has a very instructive idea: "A school is not only a place surrounded by walls on four sides, with a roof over it. School is everywhere. Sometimes it's a forest, sometimes it's a mountain top. Any place where there is learning and information is a school."

It is enough that you learn this learning not episodically, but constantly. What you learn as a bachelor, master, or doctoral student loses its value to a greater or lesser extent over time. You can't say that knowledge is enough without constant learning. The concept of lifelong learning is more related to individualized education. An object that is consciously, needfully, and continuously studied is persistent. It is durable and of good quality. A stone can pierce even a stone not with a torrent, but with continuous drops.