Universal, Not Uniform

Every young person should have the chance to discover what they are capable of and develop the knowledge and skills to pursue it.

Doing that well requires two things that education has often struggled to reconcile. Every child deserves a strong foundation: access to knowledge, great teachers, and the opportunity to learn alongside others. But every child is also different. Interests emerge at different moments. Strengths develop in different ways. Sometimes it takes the right question, challenge, project, or person at exactly the right moment for learning to come alive.

At its best, education creates space for both: the foundations we share and the paths that make us individual. Yet for too many students, that balance has been difficult to achieve at scale. Learning becomes something to complete rather than something to pursue, while curiosity and exploration are pushed to the margins.

So how did we get here?

Over the past two centuries, schools evolved to solve an extraordinary problem: educating entire populations at scale. Children of roughly the same age would learn the same content, move through it at roughly the same pace, and ultimately work toward the same set of qualifications. It was an enormously effective way to make education universal – but also one that inevitably sacrificed some of the variety that makes us profoundly human.

Personalizing education around every child's interests, strengths and pace would have required a level of time and attention that no public system could realistically afford. Standardization was, in many ways, the technology that made mass education possible.

But the world that education is preparing students for has changed.

For decades now, governments and international institutions have argued that academic knowledge alone is no longer enough. The language has evolved over time, but the direction has been remarkably consistent: education should develop not only what students know, but what they are able to do with that knowledge. Students need to use their knowledge in unfamiliar situations, make decisions and work with others.

That becomes even more important in a world of AI. Producing an answer is becoming easier. Understanding how to arrive at one, question it, connect it to what you already know, and decide what to do with it becomes more valuable.

Yet education has struggled with a much harder question: how do you actually teach those things at scale?

Creativity is difficult to develop through a worksheet. Collaboration is hard to understand through an individual exam. Curiosity cannot simply be added to a curriculum as another subject. Agency develops when students have meaningful choices and experience the consequences of those choices. Judgment develops by making decisions where there may not be one obviously correct answer.

Students still need strong subject knowledge, but they also need opportunities to do something meaningful with it: investigate a question, weigh evidence, build something, or work with others on a problem that has more than one possible answer. Those experiences create room to discover an interest, practise judgment, explain their thinking, consider another perspective, and keep working when the first approach fails.

Some alternative and progressive schools have moved much further toward project-based, interdisciplinary and deeply personalized learning. They demonstrate what can happen when students receive more individual attention, have greater ownership over what they learn, and work alongside teachers, coaches and subject experts in smaller groups.

But there is a difficult economic reality underneath many of those models.

In these schools, individual attention depends on smaller classes, more coaches and subject experts, and more time for preparation and feedback. Bringing that approach into a typical classroom would mean asking teachers to do far more within the same school day.

And that leaves us in a strange position.

Our ambitions for education have changed dramatically, while much of how schools work has not. We increasingly want students to be creative, collaborative, entrepreneurial and curious, but we continue to organize much of their education around common content, fixed schedules and forms of assessment designed primarily for comparability.

Perhaps the problem is not that we have lacked a vision for better education. We have lacked a way to make it work at scale.

That is what technology may now begin to change.

For the first time, the cost of personalization can fall without requiring a proportional increase in the number of adults in the room. A teacher should not have to choose between giving thirty students the same experience and somehow designing thirty entirely different ones by hand. Technology can help generate different pathways through the same learning goals, connect a student's interests to questions they can investigate, keep track of learning that happens across a project, and bring together evidence that would otherwise be difficult for one teacher to follow.

Teachers still need to decide what a student needs, when to intervene and when to let them work through a problem.

Those decisions draw on a teacher’s knowledge of the subject, the student and the situation. They are consequential judgments, and they should remain human ones.

AI can support the work around them: reducing repetitive preparation, adapting resources, helping students explore, keeping track of evidence, and giving educators a clearer picture of what is happening across a classroom. But teachers should retain control over consequential decisions, and students should remain responsible for their thinking.

This is why we are building Dwyl.

We are not trying to replace a standardized system with thirty isolated educational experiences. There is value in learning together. There is value in shared knowledge, shared problems, classrooms, communities and common expectations. The future of education should not force us to choose between the collective and the individual.

Instead, I believe technology gives us an opportunity to rebalance them.

A class can work together on the same real-world challenge while individual students investigate different questions, take on different responsibilities and develop different strengths. A teacher can define what matters while students have more freedom in how they get there. Students can build strong foundations in mathematics, science, language and the humanities while seeing those disciplines come alive through problems that feel relevant to the world around them.

And because learning is happening through a project, assessment can begin to capture more than the final answer. It can look at the questions students asked, the evidence they considered, the choices they made, the way they worked with others, what changed after feedback and what they ultimately created.

The opportunity in front of us is not to discard everything that made universal education possible. It is to preserve its greatest achievement – the ability to offer every child an education – while removing some of the constraints that once made uniformity necessary.

That is the future of education I believe in: deeply personal without becoming isolating, rigorous without being uniform, and grounded in knowledge while giving students meaningful opportunities to use it.

Marc Tjoe Fat
Founder & CEO, Dwyl