Have learning styles been used for personalization?

For years, teachers patted themselves on the backs for accommodating both learning styles, sight and sound. By doing so, they felt they were meeting the variable needs of their students. In reality, they were showing hostilities towards individualism, which remains a problem to this day.


I don't want to spend too much time repeating myself. Learning through sight and sound was always an absurd concept. Even if they tried to meet the needs of both shallow types of students they acknowledged, I would be critical. The reality is that teachers did not truly embrace different approaches to these learning styles.

The typical approach to teaching both auditory and visual learners has been to force all students to read books and listen to lectures. Visual learners were not allowed to read during lectures, and auditory learners were not allowed to skip reading assignments. Both learning types were subjected to the exact same learning environment and expectations. There was no actual personalization. Teachers essentially wasted half their students' time by forcing them to learn in a manner that they viewed as ineffective.

Of course, none of this was really learning. Sight and sound were actually aimed at memorizing. Repeating everything through both sight and sound provides further evidence of the memory focus since repetition has generally been a tool for memorization. The hope has been that if a student sees and hears something enough times, the material will be remembered well enough to pass a test.