People believing their learning style is static and teachers treating learning styles as static is the actual issue.
As a basic example, if you are not familiar with how to read music, it would be hard to learn and build on music theory and harmonies. That doesn't make you an auditory learner, it just means you know how it's being taught. Abstracting the musical notes into colors or frequency isn't going to make it easier to learn just because you consider yourself a "visual" learner. Certain concepts may seem clearer and patterns could be more easily identifiable, but in practice it wouldn't be easier.
> not a inherent weakness that you can't work past.
Perhaps this is the real problem. Taking for the sake of argument that there are different inherent learning styles, perhaps the issue is that some believe that means you can't work past them. It seems much more likely that you can, with training and practice. We learn to overcome all sorts of other unique limitations, after all.
And there is some reason to believe that there are different inherent learning styles. There are many different sorts of "intelligence", after all, which implies that not everyone's brain processes information in the same way.
Personally, I don't know enough about this subject to have an opinion either way, but it's very interesting to ponder.
From my understanding the two major branches of intelligence are crystallized and fluid. Fluid being used to describes the ability to solve novel reasoning problems and crystallized being used to describe how you can solve deductive reasoning problems. Essentially how easily you can assimilate new information to a new problem and how easily you can re-apply and transform already learned information from an old problem.
Working memory is how you account for differences at an individual scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelli...
I personally believe people might be predisposed to certain strengths, similar to how a tall person may be more naturally competitive at professional basketball. But I believe for a majority of situations, the difference is negligible. Practice is more important than any inherent strength or weakness we might be born with.
I once met a guy that could draw the most amazing things, seemingly straight out of his own imagination. I asked him how he was able to do that, and he just said "I see a picture of it in my head, and I replicate it." Try as I might, I simply cannot visualize things like that. That might explain why I struggle to draw or whiteboard anything without using a visual reference.
I think it's unfair to compare yourself to an artist at that skill level because you can't judge the amount of hours it took to get to the level of being able to translate what they imagine onto paper.
I mentor all the time and the hardest is when I have to explain to kids starting out CS how I "know" what to do when I have to go from a figma mockup to a working proof of concept code. I don't know how, other than that it feels more like muscle memory than it does actual thinking. It's hard because even I don't know all of the little things I needed to learn to accomplish my goal.
[1]>"Groot's first experiment seemed to confirm this theory: He placed twenty different pieces on a chess board, imitating the layout of a possible game. Then, de Groot asked a variety of chess players, from inexperienced amateurs to chess grandmasters, to quickly glance at the board and try to memorize the location of each piece. As the scientists expected, the amateurs drew mostly blanks. The grandmasters, however, easily reproduced the exact layout of the game. The equation seemed simple: memory equals talent.
But then de Groot performed a second experiment that changed everything. Instead of setting the pieces in patterns taken from an actual chess game, he randomly scattered the pawns and bishops and knights on the board. If the best chess players had enhanced memories, then the location shouldn’t matter: a pawn was still a pawn. To de Groot’s surprise, however, the grandmaster edge now disappeared. They could no longer remember where the pieces had been placed."
The science on effectiveness of lectures is pretty strongly against them and has been for decades.
https://epigeum.com/downloads/uct_accessible/uk/01_lecturing...
> Lectures are the best way to convey information.
> Feedback: Inconclusive evidence. Lectures can be effective for conveying information – but not more so than a whole range of other methods, including independent study of textbooks.
> Lectures are the best way to develop students' understanding and thinking.
> Feedback: Contradicted by evidence. Developing understanding requires active effort by students and most lectures make students passive and so are much less effective than a range of alternatives that involve more active learning.
> Lectures are the best way to develop students' attitudes and beliefs.
> Feedback: Contradicted by evidence. Attitudes are changed by engaging in open debate, and one-way communications are relatively poor at changing what people believe.
> Lectures are the best way to inspire interest in the subject.
> Feedback: Contradicted by evidence. While a few lecturers manage to inspire their students, most do not. Lectures rarely lead to more subsequent study effort than do other methods.
> Lectures are the best way to 'model the discourse' of your subject, demonstrating how arguments are formed.
> Feedback: Inconclusive evidence. Perhaps this is because students cannot always spot the forms of argument that teachers are trying to model or realise that is what they should be paying attention to.
> Lectures are cheaper than alternatives in the use of teachers' time.
> Feedback: Inconclusive evidence. Large-class lectures are clearly cheaper than smaller discussion classes. However, they may take up a lot of teachers' time in their preparation and there may be ways of giving students access to the course content that use no teacher time at all.
> Lectures pace students through a course, making it clear what they should be studying each week.
> Feedback: Inconclusive evidence. Arguably this is quite important – and you might notice problems if you took the lecture away – but there is little evidence about this role.
I learn best through reading.
Now, it may be true that's because I grew up mostly learning by reading -- it may be a trained difference, not an inherent one -- but it's unquestionably a difference.