We live in a world obsessed with scale.

Businesses scale. Technology scales. Social media scales. A single video can reach millions of people around the world in a matter of hours. For most things, that’s a tremendous advantage.

Education is different. In fact, I would argue that education doesn’t scale at all.

Information scales beautifully. Learning does not. This distinction matters because modern education often treats the two as if they are the same thing.

If information were all that mattered, education would already be solved. Every student has access to YouTube videos, online courses, AI tutors, educational apps, digital textbooks, and countless free resources. Never before in human history has so much information been available to so many people.

And, yet, students continue to struggle. Why?

Because learning is not the transfer of information, it is the transformation of understanding.

A student can watch a video explaining fractions and still not understand fractions. A student can sit through a lecture on essay writing and still struggle to write an essay. A student can complete twenty practice problems and continue making the exact same mistake. In each of these scenarios, information was delivered, but learning never happened.

The missing ingredient is often human interaction.

Imagine a piano teacher working with a single student. The teacher notices every mistake. Every hesitation. Every breakthrough. Instruction changes moment by moment based on what the student needs.

Now imagine that same teacher working with ten students. Then thirty. Then one hundred. Then one thousand through recorded videos.

At every step, the teacher reaches more people, and at every step, something valuable is lost. Often times, it’s chalked up to the law of averages: more students means more students who are “incapable” or “lazy” or have “parents who don’t care”, and that has become the accepted explanation for decreasing literacy and math fluency rates.

In my own experience, I have seen firsthand that those aren’t the issues. Teaching and learning are fundamentally relational things. It’s not that more students don’t care, it’s that the more students we add to the mix, the harder it becomes to truly know each learner.

In a classroom full of 25-30 students, it’s nearly impossible to notice confusion before it becomes frustration. It is difficult to challenge each individual student at their exact level. In my 7th grade math classes, I had students who were completing work at the high school level, and I had students who were still counting on their fingers to add single-digit problems… and *everything* in between. The amount of differentiated instruction and evaluation that can happen in that scenario decreases with each additional student beyond what an individual teacher (and sometimes an aide) can do in a 45-minute period.

“The Rule of 8”

In the business world, there’s a philosophy that says a manager becomes significantly less effective once they exceed ~8 direct reports. The amount of time he or she is able to give to each employee becomes limited with each additional subordinate. Instead of being able to give individual, meaningful feedback, they’re forced to used generic forms and templates. Instead of being able to coach individuals, they have to spend time on process and coordination. Not that those things are necessarily bad, they just limit what each worker’s potential is.

In that same regard, large classrooms and schools, online tutors and apps become less and less able to give meaningful coaching to students with each additional student they have to deliver to. This isn’t to say every teaching resource is bad or unnecessary. Rather, it’s to bring the conversation to the alternatives, of which there are only a few for parents to choose from, primarily: homeschool, private tutoring, private school, micro schools.

Education requires relationships.

I firmly believe that students thrive only when they are known. In the schooling world, when a student is acting out or disrupting learning, we hear all the time, “build a relationship”. And, I’m all for it! But, it is logistically impossible to build a relationship with 130 students, especially when you see 20-30 of them for 45 minutes at a time each day. Students thrive when someone notices their strengths, understands their struggles, and adjusts instruction accordingly.

Students often receive that level of being known and intentional coaching in elementary school, where they may have only one or two teachers. But, then they’re thrown into middle school, where now suddenly they have 8 different teachers for 8 different classes and move from class to class before they can even have time to get comfortable. The level of personalization that they received in years prior is incredibly difficult to manage in middle school and almost impossible to receive via screens only.

The future of education isn’t bigger; it’s smaller.

Not necessarily one-on-one tutoring for every child. Not necessarily homeschooling. Learning environments small enough for students to be known, challenged, and supported.

Information scales, but education doesn’t. The closer we come to remembering the difference, the better we can serve our students.