Can learning be inclusive?

How can learning be made fun. Answers are plenty. Research on this question has been happening for decades now. With the dawn of the computer age, resources and tools relevent to learning flood the internet. They are almost always made freely available. Why then do we hesitate to experiment with new (and established) methods of learning?

Today, we have the capability to identify and address diferent kinds of learning styles. A self learner could be given all learning resources to study at his leisure. A visual learner could be given different kinds of exercises and learning material that suits his style. A social learner can be given tailor-made group activities and now has plenty of social learning tools available for free. The list just goes on. Lectures should be taken on demand. Only then will the responsibility of learning truly shift to the learner and not the teacher.

Agreed, this model would not always work in school when students are too young to understand and own up to the responsibility of learning. But there is still no reason why tools and activities that suit the child's need cannot be identified for him or her. Why can't learning be made fun for the child? Because it takes a little more effort? It is a one-time investment. Do it right the first time, and one could aways reuse the artifacts created. The only effort after that is to tweak and improvise the model.

Ufortunately, we still pledge by classroom lecture-based teaching, frigid irrelevent syllabi and a rat race model of tracking learning progress. Does competition encourage learning? That would be another post altogether.

Surely, the teach-learn/rote-test-rank method will not do good to every child. It just is not an inclusive model and not really easily scalable either! Wonder why it works so well in spite of that!