I absolutely adore my students.
I teach at BYU-Idaho, and it’s a rather conservative place. Politically, I suppose, but I mean more… personally conservative.
For example: a student came to my office recently, became frustrated over something (I can’t recall what), and whispered (and I mean nearly inaudibly here) the word “crap!” to herself.
She then looked at me and apologized. Red face. Looking at shoes. The whole nine yards.
This is not unusual. This is where I work. BYU-Idaho is glorious, and the students are absolutely wonderful. Clean language is the expectation on campus, and they just really want to do the right thing. I love it because I am a quintessential goody-two-shoes.
All of which is one long explanation of my title: I say the word “bullspit” knowing full well just how edgy it is for a good Latter-day Saint like me. I do it on purpose. And I will see my bishop about it—promise.
I will speak with my bishop about it.
I take the significant moral risk only because I need to communicate just how passionately I feel about this issue.
Learning styles are bogus. In fact, they’re a good deal worse than bogus. I tell people every chance I get. In fact, my students know that the easiest way to push my buttons is to talk about their learning styles.
And why?
Learning styles themselves are pretty anodyne. Yes, they’re bogus pseudoscience, but they’re no worse than personality tests, love languages, or horoscopes.
Rather, the frustration is that learning styles are so easy to fix and so profoundly entrenched despite being so utterly debunked.
Let me give you a few citations, here.
Derek Muller’s YouTube channel is great. He goes over it carefully here:
This one is even clearer, by the APA (and not a blog post, a press release!)
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-styles-myth
(By the way, if you’d like reviews of the research, they are fairly easily googled!)
Why do I care so much? Because roughly 90% of teachers believe in it.
90 percent. NINE-TEE per-CENT.
That’s nutty.
Here’s a research article on it:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2020.602451/full
But what I really want to get at in this little essay isn’t that it’s bogus, or even that it’s a little dangerous, or even that education has a problem with pseudoscience. My point is that we aren’t getting better—we’re making things worse. Schools of education and credentialing institutions are the ones promulgating this stuff.
Consider this tweet:
https://twitter.com/JohnPatLeary/status/1649772747604602880
(Technical note: tweet embeds appear to have stopped since Twitter and Substack have gone to war. As such, you’ll have to click the link to like, retweet, and quote tweet, but I’ll try to include what I can here.)
“This drivel is what I’m learning in my mandatory and expensive graduate education classes in order to get teacher certification in PA 🥴.”
It isn’t enough that learning styles are bogus. No, we have to add some new made-up jargon with a dash of racism just to make the point really clear. And then we have to make it a part of required credentialing classes. And then put it in state credentialing tests.
Look, I don’t like calling everything racist. I also don’t like nutpicking. But I’m presenting this as exhibit A precisely because I think it is fully in the mainstream of educational thinking.
It isn’t nutpicking at all.
Kinda makes me want to start a substack devoted to shooting down bad ideas and promulgating good ones.
UPDATE: A friend balked recently, suggesting that “surely it can’t be THAT bad—you must be exaggerating!” I assure you, dear reader, that I am not. But if you need further convincing, consider the following two research articles:
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED570861.pdf
https://the-learning-agency.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/What-Do-Teachers-Know-About-The-Science-of-Learning-1.pdf
It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.