One-on-one tutoring is the most effective method of education. In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that tutored students
performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods — that is, the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class.
Children are the future, we’re fond of saying. A method that would broadly increase their mastery of all subjects by a huge margin is clearly an unbelievably potent untapped growth vector. So, why don’t we make tutoring the default mode of education?
The answer, which is typically asserted without evidence or comment, so obvious is it supposed to be, is that tutoring doesn’t scale. Here is Richard Feynman on the subject:
I think, however, that there isn’t any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher — a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. It’s impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal.
Hence our familiar factory model of education, designed to dispense the fundamentals of human knowledge to great batches of children as efficiently as possible.
But many of these assumptions to do with scale tend to collapse on further investigation. For example, most of us would reflexively assume that eggs from the supermarket are cheaper to produce than eggs from uncle Bill’s chicken coop. The supermarket eggs are being produced en masse, and so the cost per egg is a fraction of what Bill is paying for feed, upkeep, etc.
In fact, the exact opposite is true. A 2019 study by Ted Trainer, T. A. Malik and M. Lenzen found that supermarket eggs are at least 50 times more costly to produce than eggs from backyards or village cooperatives, even before factoring in the many negative externalities of mass production, such as pollution from long-distance transportation, chemical runoff from industrial farming, and accumulation of packaging waste — on the scale of civilization as a whole, a supermarket egg may cost upwards of 300 times more energy than a backyard or ecovillage egg.
Bill has no need to pay for feed, because his chickens form part of an integrated whole. In the manner of all natural and simple things, this arrangement happens to be astonishingly efficient. It has evolved, after all–unlike the slapdash and unwieldy systems cobbled together by sheer force of will to feed our bulging cities.
Industrial egg production must pay to dispose of chicken shit and must pay for huge quantities of chicken feed. In an integrated agricultural community, chickens are part of the loop. Their outputs correspond to the inputs of other subsystems, and vice versa. Chicken manure can be used in the garden, and chickens are natural tenders of garden beds, eating slugs and fallen fruit. They can find much of their food through free ranging, and the rest of their diet can be covered by kitchen scraps and expired leftovers. They don’t mind; they are nature’s perfect vacuum.
Mass production carries inflated labour costs. People spend their days in the chicken factory — a degrading pastime by any metric — and they go home and self-soothe with drink or worse. Plenty of others work in offices, dealing with such things as marketing, supply chain management, insurance, legal consultancy — all told, thousands of expensive and highly trained professionals occupy niches in the great egg matrix. Whereas in villages, “no formal skills or credentials are needed. The necessary expertise is relatively simple and can be maintained through informal local interaction. Thus children, ordinary people and those physically or mentally disadvantaged can make valuable contributions to egg supply.” In all respects, the simple, natural, traditional way of keeping chickens is superior to the machine.
And who can say that such a system is not scalable? It works; it can work as many times and in as many places as you like.
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Better than a scalable model is a pattern which is indefinitely replicable.
It’s true that tutoring doesn’t scale. But the pattern of one person teaching another person — that pattern is perfect. It cannot be improved upon.
Our obsession with scale is a product of our civilized habit. Enough eggs must be produced not only to feed the people taking care of the chickens but also all of the unproductive people in the city, who can’t keep chickens themselves. A house is clearly a replicable pattern, but it won’t do for the city — we need apartment complexes.
When something scales up it must be changed in some way; it must lose something. Apartments do not have yards. But when a pattern is replicated it need not be changed at all. The pattern of a house is solid; it will always work the same–though of course, like the pattern of a sonnet or a human being, it may take infinitely many forms.
All such patterns come thoroughly tested by evolution. They have been honed to their most optimal form.
Creating a scaled-up model should not be our first instinct; it is only ever the second best option, to be used when necessary. The best and the most efficient, always, is simply a replicable, sustainable pattern. The best and most efficient way for a civilization of any size to paint with watercolours, is for individuals to have watercolours and paper and to paint. Likewise the best and most efficient way to produce eggs is for local farming cooperatives to keep chickens. It is worse, and less efficient, to cram thousands of chickens into a huge grotesque factory and shell out billions on vast distribution systems to spread the eggs far and wide. Something has been lost in the scaling-up: the felt relationship of symbiosis with the chickens. A symbiotic relationship is a really beautiful thing. To turn it into a relationship of violence and exploitation is a little like rape. Intercourse is mutual giving. Symbiosis is mutual giving. Making the giving into a taking is deeply repulsive; it is one of the most obvious and visceral violations of universal law. The material exchange is maintained, but the spirit has been hijacked and forgotten. It’s wrong to treat chickens this way. Well, obviously, that’s old news, along with all the stuff on pollution etc from earlier, but since all of these obvious protests have gotten us nowhere against the machine and meanwhile gone shrill and stale as impotent righteous indignation always does in the long run, they may presently cede the floor to the fact that it is not even more cost-effective.
Is it not possible that physical cities will soon be obsolete? The internet is capable of providing all of the density of interaction and acceleration of cultural evolution which was always the city’s raison d’être. Cities are inefficient and unsustainable, so if this collective-organism-thing could migrate to digital space, and we could live local economic lives while also being connected to the global web of culture, a new horizon of social potentialities would emerge. For the first time, one could enjoy a life of traditional human fulfillment, of harmony with community and the land, while actively participating in the unfolding of art, science, and thought on the scale of civilization. This great synthesis is within reach.
And then we could all have our villages, our houses, our chicken coops and our watercolours.
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Erik Hoel and Henrik Karlsson have written marvellous essays on the upbringing of geniuses. According to Karlsson, the key variable is the milieu within which the child grows. Like soil desiccated by decades of monocultural monotony, a stagnant environment cannot nurture a child’s highest potential. Rich soil is alive with dense complexity. Those children who grow up to achieve exceptional things tend to be surrounded by exceptional adults from an early age. They are given ample opportunity to freely explore and challenge themselves.
They are also, usually, tutored. Hoel makes a vigorous argument that “we don’t make Einsteins anymore” because the industrial school system has replaced the classic model of what he dubs “aristocratic tutoring,” in contrast to “contemporary tutoring…which is overwhelmingly targeted at a small set of measurables that look good on a college resume.”
Aristocratic tutoring was not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields.
Both essays are positively flush with examples. Marcus Aurelius, Leo Tolstoy, John von Neumann, Blaise Pascal, Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx, Marie Curie, John Stuart Mill, Voltaire, Goethe, Virginia Woolf, Mozart, Alexander the Great, and, yes, Einstein were all tutored — most as their primary form of education.
What made this form of tutoring so effective was, naturally, the relationship between tutor and student. The better part of instruction took the form of an extended conversation, through which the child was introduced to concepts far beyond their current understanding. Mind, like air, expands to fill the given space. Those children blessed with intelligent and engaging tutors could stretch the limits of their understanding and ability. It’s no wonder that this method enjoyed such spectacular results.
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So, is tutoring scalable? Gifted teachers do exist. Are they so few and far between that they must either be reserved for the aristocracy, or else spread thin across ephemeral batches of pupils?
I tend to take an evolutionary view of the allocation of talent. Supposing humans evolved to live in tribes of 100 people or so, the essential archetypes like that of the teacher would be common enough for every tribe to get at least a few in each generation. Plus, almost everyone is at least a competent teacher when it comes to stuff they’re an expert on. Even the most autistic physicist can still teach physics. Even the most taciturn blacksmith can nurture an apprentice to mastery. After all, they became, once, too.
It makes evolutionary sense that most people should be decent teachers, because a tribe that cannot pass on knowledge and skills to the next generation will die out in a hurry.
If we are currently achieving a minute fraction of our potential learning outcomes, then we are that tribe.
There is clearly nothing more important than education. It is to societies what procreation is to individuals: their most urgent purpose, which permeates every instinct.
And if we believe the research (and what do we believe in if not The Research) that tutoring is oodles more effective, then we should be doing everything we can to make it happen.
Now, there are plenty of conceivable ways to do this. We could have AI tutors integrated into Khan Academy-type online schools. But I think most people would agree that a crucial part of teaching is the relationship between teacher and student. Like all human things, it is best done face to face.
Even if AI tutors were eminently viable, why skimp on the most important function of society? As I say, education is to cultures what procreation is to organisms. And teaching is not just a duty or a necessity; it is a pleasure. Like having sex and raising children, it is one of life’s most fulfilling experiences. If we devised a way for AI-powered androids to copulate at scale on our behalf, pump out newborns like clockwork, and feed the growing legions on vast arrays of mechanical breasts, would we not still infinitely prefer to do it ourselves?
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I’ll cut to the chase. The solution to our education problem is communal living.
In a tribal village, everyone lives and works together. Nobody is ‘going to work,’ so there is no need to shell out the money for daycare factories. There are certainly people in the village who spend a lot of time caring for and entertaining the children, but that’s the point — it is woven seamlessly into the fabric of days.
Next you find that you can do a lot of really high-quality teaching while also doing productive tasks. Obviously building a shed is the perfect time to teach a child about building. You may be slowed down by 30 or even 50%, but this is still an extraordinarily efficient ‘stack.’ Directly productive tasks like farming, building, weaving — the stuff of life — may seamlessly be coupled with intimate and therefore effective tutoring on how to do these tasks. Nothing could be more natural. And it’s the accumulation of small efficiencies like this that make a group of humans living together in communion way more efficient in the long run than our loose coalition of individuals operating great lumbering institutions to dispense all of the necessities of life.
Plus, it’s not limited to things like building where you learn by doing and teach by showing. The principle extends to almost any subject you could imagine, even the most abstract and intellectual. Recall that a pillar of the institution of aristocratic tutoring was the free-form dialogue between tutor and student. The tutor would assign books based on the student’s interests and abilities. Then the two would discuss the book and any other ideas which presented themselves. It is this aspect of the aristocratic tutoring model that produced so many geniuses. The child is taken seriously as interlocutor, and given space to move through the field of ideas. They learn to situate themselves within it, read the clues in the landscape, like how water flows downhill toward the ocean.
I’m the kind of guy who would’ve been a tutor to young aristocrats. I have the teaching instinct. Now, why couldn’t I do 90% of my tutoring on philosophy, history, and science while I cook or clean or skin a rabbit? I have the knowledge on hand. I can assign books to the child which she can read on her own time. I don’t need to be there pointing at the book. I am useful as a wellspring of information and a sounding board for her ideas, and I can easily perform these functions while doing menial tasks which need to be done, and perhaps these tasks will reflect the day’s learning material in resonant ways, such as discussing biology or the philosophy of death while I skin the rabbit.
Now, under our model of specialization, we assign certain people the role of ‘teacher,’ and others the role of ‘farmer,’ ‘cook,’ ‘truck driver,’ ‘soldier,’ and so on. The idea of a truck driver also being a philosopher and bringing a precocious child from his community along to discuss ideas while driving, this does not compute with our system of doing business. The truck driver is assumed to be void of other abilities — it doesn’t matter whether or not he is a philosopher; what matters is that he delivers the goods — and he drives alone. Meanwhile, all of the children, precocious or not, are sent to the same daycare factory where they sit and are lectured to and complete assignments which are evaluated as proof of learning.
Whereas the child who has gone along on the adventure, the proof of his learning will be that he is animatedly discoursing on Zeno’s paradox to anyone who will listen. Assignments are unnecessary.
Of course our instinct is to say well what kind of guy is this truck driver and why am I entrusting my kid to him. This alone proves that our towns and cities are not true communities. We do not know or trust our neighbours, so we cannot truly love them. The network does not function as an integrated whole.
In a committed community, you would know everyone, and the truck driver would be your brother and friend. Trusting him with your child would be a no-brainer, as he would trust you with his. Thus the work of teaching is shared by all of the adults in the community. Organically evolving mentor-apprentice relationships are the ground of being.
Youth, too, are given a chance to contribute. Why shouldn’t a boy of 14 help out building sheds and harvesting crops, as well as learning about algebra and the french revolution? He certainly is filled with gusto to do so. He will grow restless if he only ever gets fed, and has no opportunities to really do anything. Teenagers learn lots through working, through living — and through teaching. Teenage girls in particular have a strong instinct to take care of children. Which brings us to another significant efficiency of this model: children learn not only from adults but also from older children. The 12 year old who just learned about Zeno’s paradox can come home and discuss it fireside with a 16 year old who learned about it years ago and has it placed somewhere in his map of ideas. Where is the opportunity for this in our school system? We sort all of the children by age and stick them all together in rooms. A bright 12 year old is going to spend his days surrounded by likely less-bright 12 year olds who have never heard of Zeno’s paradox! And the teacher is responsible for all 30 of them, and has to do her best, and she will go home and cook for herself and clean her own house, on her own time.
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In the tribe, each child will have access to a whole community of tutors, of all ages, interests, and abilities.
They will also have access to all of the knowledge in the world, via the internet.
Hoel points out that we’ve had this for a couple decades now:
I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.
Think about the advent of the internet long enough and it seems impossible to not start throwing away preconceptions about how genius is produced. If genius were just a matter of genetic ability, then in the past century, as the world’s population increased dramatically, and as mass education skyrocketed, and as racial and gender barriers came thundering down across the globe, and particularly in the last few decades as free information saturated our society, we should have seen a genius boom — an efflorescence of the best mathematicians, the greatest scientists, the most awe-inspiring artists.
If a renaissance be too grand for you, will you at least admit we should have expected some sort of a bump?
And yet, this great real-world experiment has seen, not just no effect, but perhaps the exact opposite effect of a decline of genius.
I submit that the conditions on the ground are so bad that young people are generally in no position to make good on the expansion of possibility offered by the internet. They have been alienated from their sense of possibility and personal autonomy. So wrote Ivan Illich, the terrific Christian thinker:
School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity…Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers.
The school system is so catatonically bad that most kids come home and just want pleasure and stimulation, and the whole infinite library of Alexandria can’t compete with porn and video games. But this is by no means a given. In the tribe, the child’s days are exciting and varied, and the child is motivated, since they are surrounded by motivated adults. Only the disempowered and alienated child would use the global mind of the species as a mere opioid.
It is not, therefore, the screens themselves that put our children at risk; it is the meaninglessness of life in the modern school system which makes them vulnerable to addiction. John Stuart Mill and Alexander the Great would surely have eschewed TikTok, because they had better things to do. They were children, but their world was wide open to them. The great adventure of life is infinitely more compelling than any pale hedonism.
It’s clear that the school system doesn’t work. It engenders in society’s youth the precise mindset of the factory labourer who uses addiction to cope with their demeaning and boring life. Let’s not keep going down the same dead end. Let us foster communities capable of offering our children dynamic, challenging, and beautiful lives — instilling in them the motivation to make the most of their potential.
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Civilization is its education.
Civilization is a kind of mould that each nation is busy making for itself to shape its men and women according to its best ideal. — Tagore
The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out. — Emerson
Our guys have been known to kill themselves. Else they become cubicle drones or opioid zombies. We produce greedy conmen, craven pundits, insecure trophies, and bitter labourers. By wasting our children’s most precious expansive tone-setting growth years training them to sit still and do nothing, we are choosing this outcome. None feel particularly powerful or autonomous by the end of this process. Their will and imagination atrophy. They are in no position to navigate through the world, confidently to make the choices that will define them, and so they resign themselves to soul-numbing work and idle consumption.
Too often in our politics we confuse outcomes for parameters. The zombification of our citizenry is just something we have to deal with, we think, so quit complaining and let’s figure out some coping strategies. No. We have chosen this outcome, and we can choose differently. We decide how we are going to live, and what kind of human beings we are going to raise.
If we truly take our future seriously, then we must once again live communally. In community, tutoring is seamlessly integrated into daily life. And it is undeniably scalable.
Today’s technologies will empower our children to freely explore the ocean of knowledge, while growing up rooted in place and community. They are the ones who will chart the course. Our job is to build a new way of life, that they may thrive. Raising our children is how we choose the future.