There is something strange about how digital education has evolved. Something subtle, but deeply telling. An inordinate volume of technology is now assembled to support what is ultimately an audience of one.
Whole platforms, backend systems, video delivery pipelines, interactive dashboards, auto-grading engines, progress trackers—all built to serve a single learner sitting alone, watching a screen. The more successful the platform, the more seamlessly it isolates the learner. This is not just a technical feat. It is a pedagogical transformation. And one I believe we should question.
Digital learning, at its best, promises flexibility, accessibility, and personalisation. But at its core, it is built on the premise that learning should conform to the rhythms of the individual: their pace, their schedule, their preferences. It is, in effect, a vision of education as a solitary pursuit.
This is not how human beings have historically learned.
From the village elder to the classroom teacher, from apprenticeships to seminar rooms, learning has always been fundamentally social. We learn not just by absorbing content, but by being around others who are also learning. We compare, we mimic, we respond, we compete, we explain, we ask, we misunderstand and get corrected. Education has always been a communal act.
What digital infrastructure often tries to do is reintroduce this social dimension artificially: through forums, upvotes, comment threads, and gamified avatars. But these are weak proxies. A comment section is not a conversation. A discussion board does not generate presence. The subtle social forces that drive real learning—accountability, encouragement, embarrassment, admiration, critique—are largely absent.
A learner alone is not just isolated; they are unseen.
Which means they can hide. They can stagnate. They can misunderstand in private and never know. They can quit without consequence.
And all the while, the system continues to function as if learning is occurring. Because technically, nothing has gone wrong. The progress bar may still move. The video still plays. But the human-to-human energy that anchors real education is missing.
This is not to say that digital tools have no role to play. But we must be honest: what they gain in scale and convenience, they often lose in co-presence and communal momentum.
I am increasingly convinced that the future of impactful learning is not individualised scalability, but small-group intensity. Real human gatherings. Real-time correction. Shared silence. Laughter. Frustration. Insight. A room where people see each other striving, and help each other through.
We don’t just learn to know. We learn to belong, to contribute, to change.
Any educational model that forgets this is not just inefficient—it is profoundly wasteful.
We must stop pretending that learning is a personal optimisation problem to be solved with more software. We must return to what was always true:
We learn better when we learn together.