“The fact that some people are visual thinkers while others are auditory”
I thought the “visual learner” classification was a myth.
I thought the “visual learner” classification was a myth.
However I would caution not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is a growing body of evidence that some people are better or worse at visualizing, have a stronger or weaker internal monologue, etc. than others. There are reported neurophysiological differences as well as task behavior differences if you look at people with Aphantasia for example.
As the other article sent to you mentions, someone who is not very visual could potentially benefit even more from visual examples, so these results are not really in conflict with the failures of education theory. It's also not clear how common large disparities in the modalities of thinking are, so perhaps it is not something worthwhile to consider for mass education policy regardless. But I think in a neuroscience context it remains an interesting topic for future research.
I'll also note that the author of the original piece is autistic, and she has clearly demonstrated savant-level abilities on certain visualization tasks. It's not surprising that she would feel this way about "learning styles", because her entire life experience has likely been extremely lopsided towards visual thinking.
That may be over-generalizing. From what I've seen, the studies that debunked this idea debunked something fairly specific, not necessarily every possible formulation of what this phrase could mean to people.