Problems in education are not only wicked, but they are also pervasive! One finds that nearly all of the on-going problems are, indeed, wicked. That is to say, they are ones in which there seem no definitive solution. Likely, this is because those problems which aren't wicked, are actually solved very easily when you have a bunch of good minds and passionate educators eager to tackle them. The wickedness of the problem is really in that neither the problem, nor the variables that go into it can be clearly defined. And there is something else as well, which the authors Rittel and Webber (1973) have either neglected or intentionally ignored (perhaps because it is a white elephant); in order for something to be classified as a 'better' solution than other, there must be some metric upon which it is gauged. Any such metric is a scale, which is in one direction moving closer to 'the best' and in the other direction moving towards 'the worst'. It may very well be that we can't see the ultimate end of those scales, but we are acknowledging that there is such a scale. That, unfortunately, is where the politics of the wicked problem comes in. On the whole, we can't agree what that metric is. For example, if all of society agreed that the end-goal of education was to 'sort' students into different classes to grease the economic machine, then many of the 'wicked' problems would largely disappear. That's a rare position these days, but not so much at the dawn of the 20th century. Today, most agree the goal of education is something to do with providing a 'quality' education for all students. That's nice enough, and most people agree with the general statement, probably because the statement itself lends itself to a huge amount of interpretation, so much so that nearly anyone can find a way to fit their own worldview into it - a worldview which will vary significantly depending on one’s background, race, religion, creed, gender, etc. Surely, as each individual is different, so too is a ‘quality’ education for that individual. The problem lies in defining what a 'quality' education looks like. I suspect this basic principle is the seed from which much of the push towards personalized learning is currently coming from.
References:
Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169
Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169