Before Todd Rose became a Harvard professor, he was an educational failure: a high-school dropout working minimum wage jobs.

After he turned his life around in night school and college, finishing top of his class and winning a graduate school place at Harvard, it became pretty clear that he had not been held back through lack of ability.

So it was natural to ask, how many other students like him were being let down by their schooling? And how could the system do better for them?

His conclusion, set out in his recent book The End of Average, is that mass education has relied on crude standardisation. It doesn’t reflect students’ individuality, but instead a tendency to rank individuals according to their deviation from the mean.

And our ranking against averages can have dramatic consequences for students’ educational experience.

 “We know there’s no such thing as an average kid,” he says. “If you list the attributes that matter, in math class or in the student as a whole, those dimensions just don’t correlate with each other. Every kid has this jagged profile.” 

A change in thinking

Rose proposes three principles to improve our thinking about individuals. The first is this idea of jagged profiles: our strengths and weaknesses are complex and highly specific.

The second is that traits are a myth: instead, he suggests that individuals all display different characteristics in different circumstances. Rose’s own experience of schooling was influenced by an incident in which he was labelled aggressive - just one example of the way schools risk stereotyping their students.

Lastly, he says that all pathways to success are individual and eccentric. Take learning to walk: aggregate data told scientists there was a “normal” sequence, involving crawling then walking. But later studies show there are at least 25 pathways for learning to walk, and that children often go back and forth between stages. This is typical of the way we learn, Rose suggests.

This idea that pace of learning is individual and has no relation to ability in the long-term is something that Rose believes is crucial for schools. 

“My view of potential is, let’s stop thinking that we can predict it in any one individual and focus our efforts right now on creating highly favourable conditions for as many people as possible,” he says. “And let’s see what happens.”

This is an edited version of an article in the 21 October edition of TES. To subscribe, click here. This week’s TES magazine is available at all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here.

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