“Learning styles”! That’s the idea—trumpeted for decades in education schools and school districts across the country—that children have many different individual ways of absorbing classroom material, and it’s up to the teacher to present that material in ways that accommodate all of those preferred styles.

Learning-styles lingo—along with directives that make learning-styles-accommodation mandatory—has been around since at least the 1980s, plaguing algebra teachers wondering how to present the quadratic formula in a way that appeals to that kid whose preferred learning style is “kinesthetic.”