Custom Everything, But Not...?

Walk into a coffee shop.

Order something complicated. Half-caf. Oat milk. Two pumps vanilla. Extra hot. No foam. Cinnamon dusted. Light ice.

No one flinches. The barista writes it down carefully. The system is designed for it. The menu anticipates variation. Customization is not just expected. It is the entire business model.

We have all been there. Standing behind someone whose drink order sounds like a recipe with seventeen steps. And we wait. We do not storm out. We do not ask the barista whether this is sustainable. We do not question whether it is fair that one person's order takes longer than everyone else's. We just wait, because the system was built to hold that kind of variation, and everyone in line accepts it without thinking twice.

Walk into a tailor. Ask for a suit cut to your body. Adjust the shoulders, shorten the sleeves, change the lining, add a monogram. That is quiet luxury. You are paying for precision, and precision means the thing fits you. Nobody questions it. They admire it.

Buy a car. Choose the trim, the interior, the software package, the driving mode. Heated seats. Upgraded sound. Custom wheels. That is a flex on the gram. No one says you are asking for special treatment. They say you are configuring your experience, and they want to know how.

Now walk into a school and ask for the same thing.

Ask for flexible deadlines because your child processes information at a different pace. Ask for sensory accommodations because fluorescent lighting triggers migraines. Ask for alternative communication methods because your child's mind works in images, not paragraphs. Ask for differentiated instruction because the standard delivery does not reach the way your child actually learns.

The tone changes immediately. Is that fair to the other students? Is that sustainable? Is that really necessary? Can we even do that?

Nobody asked those questions about your latte.

And it is not only the accommodations that meet resistance. It is curiosity itself. The student who wants to explain their thinking, who wants to follow a thread further than the lesson plan allows, who wants to deep dive instead of move on to the next objective — that student is not being celebrated for engagement. They are being flagged for disruption. The coffee shop held your seventeen-step order without complaint. The classroom cannot hold a child who wants to think longer.

Fit Is Celebrated Everywhere Except Where It Matters Most

Starbucks built an empire on the premise that your drink should be yours. Nike lets you design your own shoes. Tesla lets you configure your vehicle down to the software update. Apple gives you accessibility settings, font sizes, color contrast, screen readers, all built in and never questioned. The message across every industry is the same: the more precisely something fits you, the better it is.

No one calls it unfair that your car has features someone else's does not. No one calls it special treatment when your phone is set up for the way you see. That is just good design.

Public education was built on a different premise. Age-based cohorts. Standardized pacing. Uniform curriculum. Bell schedules. The system was optimized for moving large numbers of people through the same process at the same speed. It was not designed for variation. It was designed for throughput.

When a system is built for uniformity, variation looks like a problem. A child who needs something different is not receiving design feedback. They are creating a disruption. Their need is not a feature request. It is a complaint.

That framing is the issue. Not the child. Not the need. The framing.

The Double Standard Is Not Subtle

Anyone can customize a latte. You do not need to be wealthy. You just need to be willing to spend six dollars and the barista will make it exactly the way you want it. That is available to everyone, every day, without justification.

When that same person asks for their child's learning environment to fit the way their child's mind actually works, it becomes a process. An IEP. A 504 plan. MTSS. RTI. Layers of acronyms, meetings, evaluations, documentation, and gatekeeping standing between a child and the kind of fit that every other industry considers basic design.

When someone orders a tailored suit, it is called elegance. When a parent requests an Individualized Education Program so their child can access learning, it is called a burden on the system.

Customization is celebrated when it expresses preference. It is resisted when it expresses need. And the proof is already in front of us. Private schools do this every day. Small class sizes. Individualized attention. Flexible pacing. Tailored support. Parents pay premium tuition for what is marketed as "personalized learning" and no one questions whether it is sustainable. It is simply called excellence. When a public school attempts to provide the same thing through an IEP or a 504 plan, it is called a burden on the system. The service is identical. The population is different.

You can customize anything as long as you can pay for it. That is taste. That is freedom. That is the market working. When personalization is tied to disability, cognitive difference, or equity, it stops being aspirational and starts being political. It is no longer about configuring your experience. It is about redistributing resources: time, attention, flexibility, care. And systems are far more comfortable redistributing luxury than redistributing access.

When we design a product, we iterate until it fits the user. When we design technology, we conduct user testing until the experience feels intuitive. When we design buildings, we account for how bodies actually move through space. The entire premise of good design is that the system should fit the person, not the other way around.

In education, we reverse that logic. We build the system first and then ask the child to fit into it. When they cannot, we label the child. Not the system.

The Question

Why are we comfortable building entire industries around personalized consumption and uncomfortable building systems around personalized learning?

Why is it normal to customize comfort for adults with money and controversial to customize support for children with different minds?

If customization is a sign of quality in every other domain, why does it become suspect when it centers equity?

We are telling an entire generation of learners that their minds are the problem, when the actual problem is a system that was never built to hold them. Fit is not a luxury. It is a principle. And until we treat it that way in education, we are designing for the average and calling it equal.