Dynamic by Design

Beyond the Lecture / Broadcast

The idea of personalized education sounds so obvious it can feel empty.

Of course learners are different. Of course the best teachers adapt. Who would argue otherwise?

Yet walk into most classrooms, scroll through most online courses, or flip through any standardized textbook, and what you’ll find is neither personalized nor dynamic. Lectures are broadcasts.

So are podcasts.

Masterclass videos may be an improvement over old professors reading their papers out at conferences, but only as a matter of production value, not form factor.

Why?

Because personalization, the kind that touches a learner’s background, interests, and style, is expensive.

And dynamism, the kind that adjusts in real time to the learner’s curiosity or confusion, requires virtuosity.

Let’s define our terms.

“Personalized” means instruction shaped around the individual: their story, strengths, blind spots, and goals. It means learning that sees you.

“Dynamic” means live responsiveness. Not prerecorded or prewritten, but adaptive.

Throughout history, this kind of learning was largely the privilege of the elite.

Kings and aristocrats hired tutors.

These tutors, working one-on-one, could shape lessons to the child’s disposition. They could follow tangents, indulge eccentric passions, and correct errors as they emerged.

This kind of education created geniuses.

Mozart, Pascal, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, each received intense, personalized attention at a critical developmental age.

But if you were a blacksmith’s son? Or a farmer’s daughter? You went to the village school and sat in rows. The curriculum was fixed. The pace was set by someone else. Your job was to keep up.

Personalized dynamism couldn’t scale. Until now.

John Dewey argued that learning should begin in the experience of the learner. People learn through doing. And they learn best when they’re doing what matters to them.

Maria Montessori built an entire pedagogy around individualized exploration. The role of the educator was not to deliver content but to shape an environment in which children could act, choose, and grow.

And yet, the scalability problem remained.

What if the conditions that once shaped aristocratic brilliance could now be available to anyone?

That’s the wager of this moment.

AI, in its most hopeful form, can scale attention.

A landmark 1984 study by Benjamin Bloom showed that one-on-one tutoring could produce 2 standard deviations of improvement over conventional classroom instruction. That means the average tutored student outperformed 98% of students in the traditional model.

But AI can now simulate the core advantages of that model, adaptivity, responsiveness, presence, without the human labor costs. That doesn’t replace human teaching. It augments it. It frees teachers to do what only they can do: build trust, inspire, intervene when it matters most.

Hasn’t every ed-tech platform promised “personalized learning” at some point?

Yes, and many failed to deliver. They confused “tracking metrics” with seeing the person. They optimized for quizzes, not questions.

Others might argue that personalization itself is overhyped, that sometimes students need to conform to a shared standard, that not all learning should bend to preference.

This is true. Education is not about pampering. It’s about growth, and growth often means being challenged, encountering difficulty, confronting otherness.

Personalization should not be conflated with a lack of rigor.

Personalization and challenge are not opposites.

In fact, the deepest challenges come when someone knows you well enough to stretch you precisely.

For the first time in history, we can build tools that are dialectical by default.

Tools that dialogue with us.

If we get this right, we don’t just make education more efficient.
We make it more human.

But here’s the irony: this very essay can’t respond to you.

It can’t pause when you’re confused or annoyed or moved.
It can’t ask what you think about Wittgenstein.
It can’t push back when you skim.
It can’t be surprised by your insights.

It can only guess.

So let’s not end with a summary. Let’s end with a question, one that doesn’t presume to know where you are, but invites you to respond from wherever that is:

What’s the most meaningful learning experience you’ve ever had, and what made it feel like it was meant for you?