What strikes me here is how broad these people are. Most STEM "intellectuals", especially bloggers or writers on substack, have the foggiest ideas about the humanities
I think this is a real issue. Perhaps one frame is: there's a good excuse to not know much about physics (it's very difficult and technical, requires an advanced background in math like calculus, etc). However, there's no good excuse to not know much about the humanities. You just pick up a book. So there's a fundamental asymmetry that makes this gap even more unfortunate.
The problem is that when you pick up the book you may find a load of rubbish. So many very bad, obviously bad, obvious-to-even-an-11-year-old bad books have been written in the humanities. 'Untrue history for idiots' could be it's own section of any bookstore. Now, if you have a good humanities tutor helping you with this, you may get a lot of mileage out of discussing why such-and-such is wrong, and arguing whether the author is a fool or a knave, or merely mistaken. But if you don't have such a person handy, the urge to stop wasting your time and move onto something which is more falsifiable, testable and verifiable is entirely understandable ... especially if you are the sort of person for whom mathematics comes rather easily.
I think a lot depends on how broad you take the term "the humanities." If you are thinking of highly academic humanities papers ("The epistemology and social awareness of early authors in Ancient Siberia") then I think this could be true. However, if we take "the humanities" to mean, e.g., reading the classics, or history, or even learning an art, then I do think the bar is much lower on that side of things (which doesn't, imo, devalue them), and I also don't think of those as wasted time, but again, that's taking as broad a definition as possible.
No, as a child I had the good fortune to have my mother in the house. So I we could give Joseph Campbell's *The Golden Bough* and Laing's *The Divided Self* and Mill's *On Liberty* a rather thorough arguing and criticising, sifting what we thought was correct from what we thought was anything but. But I needed somebody more knowledgeable than I around to help me make sense of things.
The issue is like - Most people don't consider much of the humanities to have any sort of intellectual value at all, cf the commenter below who said that learning Ancient Greek is one of the most useless activities possible. There's a pernicious instrumentalism going on, which makes like, "can program in C++" as some sort of signal of intelligence, a devaluing of everything of anything not in a narrow frame of thought, like the entire history of philosophy from Plato to Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to yes, the much maligned postmoderns
I’m so enjoying this series of essays. Thank you. As a home-educating family, we find that many of the strategies you describe here are as rewarding as they are effective. We aren’t consciously trying to raise “geniuses,” but our two sons do have an unusual level of intellectual curiosity — and appetite for learning — especially compared to their schooled peers.
I am about to embark on our own homeschooling, and these essays have become hugely inspiring as we consider our curriculum and methods. Above all, they further serve to remove all hesitation to homeschool, for the opportunities are obvious and the alternative obviously weaker.
Not going to lie bro, laying here in my bed at 30, barely halfway through my clin psyc/PhD program, a life full of misdirections and false starts, I'm feeling a little sad my wonderful and intellectually brilliant parents didn't satisfy my curiosity as much as they could have. I remember my father teaching me single and double point perspective when I was 4/5 and reading to me Bill Brysons 'The Short History of Nearly Everything' by my bedside, but after that I was on my own, scrounging for any scraps of information - that luckily I must say, did sit on their enormous and varied bookshelf. I would love you to do a piece on 'late bloomers', who lacked intimate tutor-relationships as children, and after misdirection, found their way and maybe produced something brilliant. This is the case for artists, certainly.
What’s most interesting to me is that Mill and Pascal got a lot of tutoring from their fathers. I don’t have kids, so maybe this is naive, but do you think it’s possible for contemporary people to try to bring some amount of aristocratic tutoring to their parenting? Is that just a luxury of being an aristocrat? Or does aristocratic tutoring lose its benefits when it’s performed in addition to (rather than instead of) modern schooling? You mention free time as an important characteristic of successful tutoring, and at the end it seems like you’re suggesting that schooling will have to change if there’s any hope for integrating aristocratic tutoring at all. I definitely agree that exams suck, especially when it comes to math, so is there any point trying it without serious education reform?
I try to imagine myself as a kid, my dad making me do more lessons on top of school, and I just think I would have hated that… but at the same time, I loved spending time with my dad, and maybe if the lessons were aristocratic and not just more homework, I would have loved them.
These are great questions Dawson. I do think it's possible to at least bring *some* of the methods of aristocratic tutoring to children now-a-days, although I think complete replication would be impossible for all but the extremely wealthy, or, alternatively, those who are somehow in the position to be able to homeschool with a lot of parental involvement. In other words, I agree with the tension you identify between tutoring and school. In China, for instance, it is very common to hire outside-of-school tutors; however, as far as I can tell, they are to help only with school itself. So I think the critical factor of aristocratic tutoring is a departure from that model. Tbh I'm not sure if such a departure could ever be institutionalized, it would require overturning so much. However, even if aristocratic tutoring could return in the form of a rare alternative (hopefully, being much more affordable in its modern incarnation), I think that would have powerful effects.
And yeah, it's interesting to think how much of Mill's education was simply taking walks with his father!
A modern version of this model is more achievable than you might think. We home educate, living on one professional parent’s income. We live in a small house, drive old cars, and don’t keep up with the Joneses. It’s amazing how much time and money this frees up for long walks, good books, and one-to-one conversation. Not achievable for anyone on a low-income salary, to be sure, but neither is it a lifestyle reserved for the 1%.
I have been tutoring my kids (2 and 5) for three years now. They still go to school but I tutor them after school from 3pm to 6pm. For now is mostly plenty of different sport activities, reading in different languages, music and algebra. Since they are trained they are not fatigued when they finish school at 3pm, instead excited about doing plenty of things with their dad. At night they sleep around 11 hours. I always make learning activities playful to keep them engaged and let them gain autonomy, I am documenting this experience on substack as well, if you are interested https://bondandlearn.substack.com/
I loved this article, thanks for sharing. I also see a connection between walking and the acquisition of knowledge to eating and digesting food. Perhaps, one could say they are the contemplative steps of the mouth that internalizes information for human flourishing. There is this savoring structure that needs to be recaptured. We “thirst” for knowledge, we must drink from gentle fountains and not gushing firehoses.
I agree with you that one-on-one education was probably was the cause of a lot of invention in 18th, 19th and early part of 20 centuries.
The invention has become much harder as most of low hanging fruits have already been picked and future invention requires collaboration of people from multiple fields and requires a very high level of specialization even in a particular subfield. As you see people are becoming highly specialized in each subfield as it is becoming harder to get a job being only having a very high knowledge of a field or subfield like you get during your bachelor’s degrees.
I also believe that two world wars from 1915 to 1945 and another 15-20 years after that led to a time where we saw inventions in certain areas but a lot of basic research suffered due to people fighting wars and/or a lot of folks have to interrupt their education and jobs to fight wars and millions of them dying in their peak years and another factor was Europe took a long time to recover from the wars.
However, I think that there is another factor playing a role especially in the last 30-40 years.
Here are a few excerpts from Utopia for Realists by
Rutger Bregman:
“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolise the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, 20 years later the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
Back in 1970, American stocks were still held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it’s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling of financial assets. In fact, we would save on frivolous expenditures that aid and abet the financial sector. Take the fiber optic cable laid to speed transmissions between financial markets in London and New York in 2012. Price tag: $300 million. Time gain: a whole 5.2 milliseconds.
More to the point though, these taxes would make all of us richer. Not only would they give everyone a more equal share of the pie, but the whole pie would be bigger. Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could go back to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.”
When our best and brightest are applying their knowledge in a zero sum games like wallstreet and trying to become rich by keeping people longer on a website or making them click on a page something will suffer and I think that is another factor playing a big role. I know several of friends kid went to an Ivy League/MIT etc schools and majority of their class mates went to either wallstreet, consulting or a tech company like mentioned above because of much higher pays. The incentive to go thru the pain of inventing which takes decades and chance that you may be a complete failure is also there when you can take a shortcut and be a multimillionaire in 10 years or less.
So to summarize, I think the priorities have changed we still produce a number of geniuses but they are very specialized and/or are focused on the industries that does not use their skills effectively. However, one-on-one education is probably the best way to produce a lot more geniuses than current education system can produce.
Hi Erik, inspiring part III, thank you for investigating and raising awareness on this subject!
Respect for setting up the goal of bringing back some of the organization and philosophy of aristocratic tutoring making more affordable. It sounds equally challenging and fun to me!
One key lever I am experimenting with my kids is how much 1:1 tutoring time is required. Before starting this experience I though as much as possible but soon realize they saturate after a certain quantity of 1:1 tutoring per day and need free time, as you describe in your article; perhaps to decompress, digest and wander about the interactions with the tutor.
My kids are still young (2 and 5) but even when we have full days available we can't go beyond 3 hours of tutoring per day. Full days are usually more productive as we do 2 sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with 3 or 4 different activities per session. When they go to school we do just one 2-3h long session in the afternoon with 3 or 4 activities. When I have to introduce a challenging new activity I only do that and shorten the session.
The bit by Russell saying "I used to enjoy impressing a new tutor with my knowledge" is more revealing than one might realize at first.
I think a key mechanism through which one-on-one tutoring in early-childhood may achieve its effects is that of a child wanting to impress / get validation from a parent-like figure.
To the point about James & John Stuart Mill, the apprenticeship model, and Aristotle’s students’ notes—
This was standard throughout 18th and early 19th c. music education as well. Many of JS Bach’s greatest masterpieces were written as pedagogical works for his sons & students. He wrote on the title of his Inventions & Sinfonias:
“Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those desirous of learning, are shown in a clear way not only 1) to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress 2) to deal correctly and well with three obbligato parts, moreover at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well, but most of all to achieve a cantabile style of playing, and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.”
Perhaps more mind-boggling are the Organ trio sonatas, some of Johann Sebastian’s greatest works, which were written for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann to practice and study as an apprentice. More to the point, many “lesser” works were written as exercises where Bach would write a bass line or a melody and expect the student to fill in the rest. The Bach family even kept a notebook where they would scribble down bits and pieces of music they heard and found interesting on their travels. They would expand upon it, write alternate versions, make arrangements, and just play with it in general. We have a fair few gems of music from that notebook. I have even found manuscripts from Wilhelm Friedemann’s later years where Johann Sebastian seems to have filled in some music where WF left off--their roles, even if only for a line or two, were reversed. In any case, their relationship was much more collaborative than what we would think of as teacher/student today.
I use the Bach family as an example because they were extraordinarily prolific, but the structure of their education was nothing unusual as far as I can tell. For example, many of the standard works we play now by JJ Quantz were originally found in notebook scribblings by his students such as JD Braun and Frederick the Great. And so on…
Music is still taught this way--for now. Conservatories are basically trade schools. It’s impossible to learn it otherwise. Even as performers we learn by playing with our teachers over the course of years, first in private duets, then in public orchestral or recital programs. But even in music schools, I see portents of this approach coming to an end in favor of more standardized education models. That, perhaps, is a topic for another time...
Anyway, thanks for this essay, Erik! Wonderful food for thought, as always.
Interesting. One irony I would add is that these polymath generalist aristocratic kid geniuses are more useful today, because we are awash in specialist findings on our laptops but have no experience integrating such knowledge. My next book is an attempt to synthesize and generalize social science thinking I expect to get most of my free PR from specialists complaining about its shallowness (despite alll the footnotes)
I sent your the first installment of this series to a friend of mine and we had a brief discussion on how the powers of tutoring would be actionable.
Basically, we boiled down the main problem to the issue of visibility within our habitats and our desire to follow what we see around us. While we spend 6+ hours in school as you mentioned, the way we view ourselves changes based on this environment. The prevalence of social media in young students (middle & high school) further exasperates the need for social inclusion. These aristocrat children did not have the same level of required social interaction (at school) with masses of children their age, and their environments were easily controlled.
So, we were brainstorming how we would be able to apply aristocratic teaching methods assuming we were able to find the money & had the tutors required. This left us with the question if the tutors would still be able to considerably influence the individuals in light of the children recognizing their uniqueness compared to their peers. Further, if the students would be able to be encouraged, or if a feeling of alienation from their peers would drive them to resist.
I understand that this series has not so far offered explicit suggestions or advocated to bring this bang, just want to hear your opinion on this as it feels one of the major roadblocks to reviving this style.
It's a very interesting thought. In a sense, we can see how it wasn't a problem at the time when it was prevalent: aristocratic children just hung out with other aristocratic children! Those were their peer group, and everything seemed quite natural. And, looking historically, what one notices immediately is that a peer group of exactly same-aged children is way less important. But while I see the lack of a "normal" peer group as a potential issue, homeschooled children deal with this all the time. And so in once sense, it's unusual, but in another sense there are millions of homeschooled children in America, and I can easily imagine how there are other ways to get a peer group (sports, playing, groups, summer camps, parental friends, extended family, etc) and alleviate some of the problems you're talking about.
I have to say that the first article in the series had a profound impact on my thinking of education, and since I'm the parent of a young kid, the future eductaion of at least one person. Thanks Eric for writing it, doing the podcasts (I heard your discussion on Palladium) and these follow up articles. I understand that its always a shot into the dark when sharing these kinds of perspectives, but at least for this one it is having an impact in me and at least some others I've shared it with.
For our situation, we are genuinely starting to frame up a tutoring approach for our daughter. The more we research, the more it seems viable and not nearly as crazy as one might expect. I wouldn't expect genius outcomes, but I would expect at least a better chance at strong critical thinking.
Lovely to hear stuff like this Jonah, thanks for letting me know. And it sounds like you have a very healthy attitude in terms of expectations and approach
But if one want to reproduce this aristocratic tutoring and homeschool their children they themselves need to be geniuses and polymaths. Even if you hire personal tutor (teacher), this person should be a top in his or her field: if you'll hire your neighbor to homeschool your kid, expect that kid to do no better than in a standard school, or even worse.
And with that, this kind of education is still aristocratic - you need highly intelligent family, with lots of talented uncles, aunts, and friends, who are ready to spend time with a child to teach that child languages/sciences/math/etc
Fully agree, the issue with hiring someone, and education in general, is that you can't assess tutor's results unless you are a genius/polymath your-self and constantly spend time with the pupil monitoring his/her improvements. Losing time from a bad tutor to another bad tutor can be worse than going to school.
1:1 aristocratic tutoring is not a thing nowadays, hance you can't find tutors with a successful track record.
It is much easier to trust brands like Harvard, worst case scenario you still have a valuable degree.
Interesting thought on what "failure" looks in aristocratic tutoring. Keep in mind, tutoring seems to be main mode of education of aristocrats, and most were not geniuses. But I think that's too high a bar to expect as the standard outcome. For example, I think its unarguable that aristocrats were more intellectually inclined than our elites today - they loved salons, the arts, they were patrons and participants in intellectual culture. While the aristocracy certainly had its problems, not being intellectual wasn't one of them. So in that sense, perhaps a failed case of aristocratic tutoring looks more like someone who is not a genius, but is a genius-appreciator.
As for IQ, it does scale with more education (every year of school adds something like a couple IQ points, although I forget the exact statistic). Given that tutoring is highly effective, I suspect it would affect it. But, as I've said in other comments, I don't view IQ, beyond acting as a minimum bar, as being very predictive of genius.
If you putter through Wikipedia or another biographical source, you'll see that most prize winners, both of scientific and literary awards, had pretty conventional educations. They all had their Road to Damascus moments, often aided by a teacher who could see their talent and help them move forward. Sometimes it was just a teacher praising an essay or saying they might make a good chemist.
The premise of this essay seems to be that aristocratic tutoring would produce more geniuses, but is that really true?
I admit that there is an attraction to this style of education. It's a great way to make someone feel special, and many people like to feel special. It avoids intellectual competition which is considered unseemly in some circles. I've tutored a fair number of high school students, so I know that tutoring can be tailored to a student's strengths and weaknesses in a way that more general education cannot.
It also has a number of obvious flaws. How many tutors would it take, and can we get that many tutors? How do we make sure each student has the right tutor with the right interpersonal chemistry? How do we, as a society, use such a system to pass on shared knowledge to the next generation when a lot of parents choose this system precisely to avoid passing on shared knowledge?
Tutoring aristocrats doesn't really have a failure mode. Charles was still going to become king as long as he outlived his mother, tutoring or no tutoring. The whole point of being an aristocrat is not having to worry about success or failure unless one chooses to as a personal matter. There's a reason they called the humanities the liberal arts, it was an education for people who were liberated from having to earn their living. It was that way under the Greeks and Romans, and it was that way in Europe until fairly recently.
Under the Romans, the liberal arts were a class marker. When the Roman Empire collapsed and the Franks took over, the class marker was eating a lot of meat.
In discussing the two articles with my colleagues, friends, and family, I came across the same initial objection: that aristocratic tutoring deprives the pupil of socialization. Erik mentioned this as a top issue in his interview on Palladium. Let me just give a perspective I've developed and see what others think.
I believe we make an error of logic if we assume ipso facto that the schooling system as we know it provides superior social outcomes. It certainly provides more same-age child contact, i.e. if we judge socialization as being in large scale interactions with other kids of the same age then it probably will indeed be best. But I suspect that schools are asymptotically arriving at maximum child-to-teacher load out of economic neccessity. That means they always will put as many children as possible together under the guidance of a given number of adults. And our schooling system is segregated by year: those kids will all be born within 12 months of each other. The maximization of child count is at least orthogonal to quality of social skill acquisition. One would assume that the social skills increase from a group size of 1, but decline also at some larger size. I don't believe the group sizes are chosen based on socialization outcomes (they may not even be chosen based on learning outcomes).
But the age segragetion seems to be outright bad for socialization in a way that something like sex-segregation or ethnic group segregation would also be seen as simply not aligned with social skill formation. Most social skills benefit from observation, immitation, and intentional instruction: all things that mixed age groups would achieve better than single-age groups. I suspect that grouping by a single age is simply a technique to simplify group teaching, both by reducing the expertise needed of the teacher and maximizing the chances that an undifferentiated lesson will fall on pupils ready for it.
So, in summary, the "the child would be too alone" risk needs to be addressed both as a true concern (social skills need to be learned indeed, so be sure that's figured out), and as a red herring argument in favour of schooling. Schools may give you bigger groups of same-age kids, but that's not to say they give you benchmark-level social skill formation.
What strikes me here is how broad these people are. Most STEM "intellectuals", especially bloggers or writers on substack, have the foggiest ideas about the humanities
I think this is a real issue. Perhaps one frame is: there's a good excuse to not know much about physics (it's very difficult and technical, requires an advanced background in math like calculus, etc). However, there's no good excuse to not know much about the humanities. You just pick up a book. So there's a fundamental asymmetry that makes this gap even more unfortunate.
The problem is that when you pick up the book you may find a load of rubbish. So many very bad, obviously bad, obvious-to-even-an-11-year-old bad books have been written in the humanities. 'Untrue history for idiots' could be it's own section of any bookstore. Now, if you have a good humanities tutor helping you with this, you may get a lot of mileage out of discussing why such-and-such is wrong, and arguing whether the author is a fool or a knave, or merely mistaken. But if you don't have such a person handy, the urge to stop wasting your time and move onto something which is more falsifiable, testable and verifiable is entirely understandable ... especially if you are the sort of person for whom mathematics comes rather easily.
I think a lot depends on how broad you take the term "the humanities." If you are thinking of highly academic humanities papers ("The epistemology and social awareness of early authors in Ancient Siberia") then I think this could be true. However, if we take "the humanities" to mean, e.g., reading the classics, or history, or even learning an art, then I do think the bar is much lower on that side of things (which doesn't, imo, devalue them), and I also don't think of those as wasted time, but again, that's taking as broad a definition as possible.
No, as a child I had the good fortune to have my mother in the house. So I we could give Joseph Campbell's *The Golden Bough* and Laing's *The Divided Self* and Mill's *On Liberty* a rather thorough arguing and criticising, sifting what we thought was correct from what we thought was anything but. But I needed somebody more knowledgeable than I around to help me make sense of things.
The issue is like - Most people don't consider much of the humanities to have any sort of intellectual value at all, cf the commenter below who said that learning Ancient Greek is one of the most useless activities possible. There's a pernicious instrumentalism going on, which makes like, "can program in C++" as some sort of signal of intelligence, a devaluing of everything of anything not in a narrow frame of thought, like the entire history of philosophy from Plato to Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to yes, the much maligned postmoderns
I’m so enjoying this series of essays. Thank you. As a home-educating family, we find that many of the strategies you describe here are as rewarding as they are effective. We aren’t consciously trying to raise “geniuses,” but our two sons do have an unusual level of intellectual curiosity — and appetite for learning — especially compared to their schooled peers.
I am about to embark on our own homeschooling, and these essays have become hugely inspiring as we consider our curriculum and methods. Above all, they further serve to remove all hesitation to homeschool, for the opportunities are obvious and the alternative obviously weaker.
Not going to lie bro, laying here in my bed at 30, barely halfway through my clin psyc/PhD program, a life full of misdirections and false starts, I'm feeling a little sad my wonderful and intellectually brilliant parents didn't satisfy my curiosity as much as they could have. I remember my father teaching me single and double point perspective when I was 4/5 and reading to me Bill Brysons 'The Short History of Nearly Everything' by my bedside, but after that I was on my own, scrounging for any scraps of information - that luckily I must say, did sit on their enormous and varied bookshelf. I would love you to do a piece on 'late bloomers', who lacked intimate tutor-relationships as children, and after misdirection, found their way and maybe produced something brilliant. This is the case for artists, certainly.
What’s most interesting to me is that Mill and Pascal got a lot of tutoring from their fathers. I don’t have kids, so maybe this is naive, but do you think it’s possible for contemporary people to try to bring some amount of aristocratic tutoring to their parenting? Is that just a luxury of being an aristocrat? Or does aristocratic tutoring lose its benefits when it’s performed in addition to (rather than instead of) modern schooling? You mention free time as an important characteristic of successful tutoring, and at the end it seems like you’re suggesting that schooling will have to change if there’s any hope for integrating aristocratic tutoring at all. I definitely agree that exams suck, especially when it comes to math, so is there any point trying it without serious education reform?
I try to imagine myself as a kid, my dad making me do more lessons on top of school, and I just think I would have hated that… but at the same time, I loved spending time with my dad, and maybe if the lessons were aristocratic and not just more homework, I would have loved them.
These are great questions Dawson. I do think it's possible to at least bring *some* of the methods of aristocratic tutoring to children now-a-days, although I think complete replication would be impossible for all but the extremely wealthy, or, alternatively, those who are somehow in the position to be able to homeschool with a lot of parental involvement. In other words, I agree with the tension you identify between tutoring and school. In China, for instance, it is very common to hire outside-of-school tutors; however, as far as I can tell, they are to help only with school itself. So I think the critical factor of aristocratic tutoring is a departure from that model. Tbh I'm not sure if such a departure could ever be institutionalized, it would require overturning so much. However, even if aristocratic tutoring could return in the form of a rare alternative (hopefully, being much more affordable in its modern incarnation), I think that would have powerful effects.
And yeah, it's interesting to think how much of Mill's education was simply taking walks with his father!
A modern version of this model is more achievable than you might think. We home educate, living on one professional parent’s income. We live in a small house, drive old cars, and don’t keep up with the Joneses. It’s amazing how much time and money this frees up for long walks, good books, and one-to-one conversation. Not achievable for anyone on a low-income salary, to be sure, but neither is it a lifestyle reserved for the 1%.
Absolutely. It is the result of a decision consciously made and worked for!
I have been tutoring my kids (2 and 5) for three years now. They still go to school but I tutor them after school from 3pm to 6pm. For now is mostly plenty of different sport activities, reading in different languages, music and algebra. Since they are trained they are not fatigued when they finish school at 3pm, instead excited about doing plenty of things with their dad. At night they sleep around 11 hours. I always make learning activities playful to keep them engaged and let them gain autonomy, I am documenting this experience on substack as well, if you are interested https://bondandlearn.substack.com/
I loved this article, thanks for sharing. I also see a connection between walking and the acquisition of knowledge to eating and digesting food. Perhaps, one could say they are the contemplative steps of the mouth that internalizes information for human flourishing. There is this savoring structure that needs to be recaptured. We “thirst” for knowledge, we must drink from gentle fountains and not gushing firehoses.
I agree with you that one-on-one education was probably was the cause of a lot of invention in 18th, 19th and early part of 20 centuries.
The invention has become much harder as most of low hanging fruits have already been picked and future invention requires collaboration of people from multiple fields and requires a very high level of specialization even in a particular subfield. As you see people are becoming highly specialized in each subfield as it is becoming harder to get a job being only having a very high knowledge of a field or subfield like you get during your bachelor’s degrees.
I also believe that two world wars from 1915 to 1945 and another 15-20 years after that led to a time where we saw inventions in certain areas but a lot of basic research suffered due to people fighting wars and/or a lot of folks have to interrupt their education and jobs to fight wars and millions of them dying in their peak years and another factor was Europe took a long time to recover from the wars.
However, I think that there is another factor playing a role especially in the last 30-40 years.
Here are a few excerpts from Utopia for Realists by
Rutger Bregman:
“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolise the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, 20 years later the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
Back in 1970, American stocks were still held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it’s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling of financial assets. In fact, we would save on frivolous expenditures that aid and abet the financial sector. Take the fiber optic cable laid to speed transmissions between financial markets in London and New York in 2012. Price tag: $300 million. Time gain: a whole 5.2 milliseconds.
More to the point though, these taxes would make all of us richer. Not only would they give everyone a more equal share of the pie, but the whole pie would be bigger. Then the whiz kids who pack off to Wall Street could go back to becoming teachers, inventors, and engineers.”
When our best and brightest are applying their knowledge in a zero sum games like wallstreet and trying to become rich by keeping people longer on a website or making them click on a page something will suffer and I think that is another factor playing a big role. I know several of friends kid went to an Ivy League/MIT etc schools and majority of their class mates went to either wallstreet, consulting or a tech company like mentioned above because of much higher pays. The incentive to go thru the pain of inventing which takes decades and chance that you may be a complete failure is also there when you can take a shortcut and be a multimillionaire in 10 years or less.
So to summarize, I think the priorities have changed we still produce a number of geniuses but they are very specialized and/or are focused on the industries that does not use their skills effectively. However, one-on-one education is probably the best way to produce a lot more geniuses than current education system can produce.
Maybe AI will argument us and will produce more geniuses in the future than ever before
https://open.substack.com/pub/oneusefulthing/p/and-the-great-gears-begin-to-turn?r=8n4qz&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Hi Erik, inspiring part III, thank you for investigating and raising awareness on this subject!
Respect for setting up the goal of bringing back some of the organization and philosophy of aristocratic tutoring making more affordable. It sounds equally challenging and fun to me!
One key lever I am experimenting with my kids is how much 1:1 tutoring time is required. Before starting this experience I though as much as possible but soon realize they saturate after a certain quantity of 1:1 tutoring per day and need free time, as you describe in your article; perhaps to decompress, digest and wander about the interactions with the tutor.
My kids are still young (2 and 5) but even when we have full days available we can't go beyond 3 hours of tutoring per day. Full days are usually more productive as we do 2 sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with 3 or 4 different activities per session. When they go to school we do just one 2-3h long session in the afternoon with 3 or 4 activities. When I have to introduce a challenging new activity I only do that and shorten the session.
The bit by Russell saying "I used to enjoy impressing a new tutor with my knowledge" is more revealing than one might realize at first.
I think a key mechanism through which one-on-one tutoring in early-childhood may achieve its effects is that of a child wanting to impress / get validation from a parent-like figure.
To the point about James & John Stuart Mill, the apprenticeship model, and Aristotle’s students’ notes—
This was standard throughout 18th and early 19th c. music education as well. Many of JS Bach’s greatest masterpieces were written as pedagogical works for his sons & students. He wrote on the title of his Inventions & Sinfonias:
“Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those desirous of learning, are shown in a clear way not only 1) to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress 2) to deal correctly and well with three obbligato parts, moreover at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well, but most of all to achieve a cantabile style of playing, and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.”
Perhaps more mind-boggling are the Organ trio sonatas, some of Johann Sebastian’s greatest works, which were written for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann to practice and study as an apprentice. More to the point, many “lesser” works were written as exercises where Bach would write a bass line or a melody and expect the student to fill in the rest. The Bach family even kept a notebook where they would scribble down bits and pieces of music they heard and found interesting on their travels. They would expand upon it, write alternate versions, make arrangements, and just play with it in general. We have a fair few gems of music from that notebook. I have even found manuscripts from Wilhelm Friedemann’s later years where Johann Sebastian seems to have filled in some music where WF left off--their roles, even if only for a line or two, were reversed. In any case, their relationship was much more collaborative than what we would think of as teacher/student today.
I use the Bach family as an example because they were extraordinarily prolific, but the structure of their education was nothing unusual as far as I can tell. For example, many of the standard works we play now by JJ Quantz were originally found in notebook scribblings by his students such as JD Braun and Frederick the Great. And so on…
Music is still taught this way--for now. Conservatories are basically trade schools. It’s impossible to learn it otherwise. Even as performers we learn by playing with our teachers over the course of years, first in private duets, then in public orchestral or recital programs. But even in music schools, I see portents of this approach coming to an end in favor of more standardized education models. That, perhaps, is a topic for another time...
Anyway, thanks for this essay, Erik! Wonderful food for thought, as always.
Interesting. One irony I would add is that these polymath generalist aristocratic kid geniuses are more useful today, because we are awash in specialist findings on our laptops but have no experience integrating such knowledge. My next book is an attempt to synthesize and generalize social science thinking I expect to get most of my free PR from specialists complaining about its shallowness (despite alll the footnotes)
In the modern era finding a true polymath is becoming increasingly rare,and this should be worrying us.
I sent your the first installment of this series to a friend of mine and we had a brief discussion on how the powers of tutoring would be actionable.
Basically, we boiled down the main problem to the issue of visibility within our habitats and our desire to follow what we see around us. While we spend 6+ hours in school as you mentioned, the way we view ourselves changes based on this environment. The prevalence of social media in young students (middle & high school) further exasperates the need for social inclusion. These aristocrat children did not have the same level of required social interaction (at school) with masses of children their age, and their environments were easily controlled.
So, we were brainstorming how we would be able to apply aristocratic teaching methods assuming we were able to find the money & had the tutors required. This left us with the question if the tutors would still be able to considerably influence the individuals in light of the children recognizing their uniqueness compared to their peers. Further, if the students would be able to be encouraged, or if a feeling of alienation from their peers would drive them to resist.
I understand that this series has not so far offered explicit suggestions or advocated to bring this bang, just want to hear your opinion on this as it feels one of the major roadblocks to reviving this style.
It's a very interesting thought. In a sense, we can see how it wasn't a problem at the time when it was prevalent: aristocratic children just hung out with other aristocratic children! Those were their peer group, and everything seemed quite natural. And, looking historically, what one notices immediately is that a peer group of exactly same-aged children is way less important. But while I see the lack of a "normal" peer group as a potential issue, homeschooled children deal with this all the time. And so in once sense, it's unusual, but in another sense there are millions of homeschooled children in America, and I can easily imagine how there are other ways to get a peer group (sports, playing, groups, summer camps, parental friends, extended family, etc) and alleviate some of the problems you're talking about.
I have to say that the first article in the series had a profound impact on my thinking of education, and since I'm the parent of a young kid, the future eductaion of at least one person. Thanks Eric for writing it, doing the podcasts (I heard your discussion on Palladium) and these follow up articles. I understand that its always a shot into the dark when sharing these kinds of perspectives, but at least for this one it is having an impact in me and at least some others I've shared it with.
For our situation, we are genuinely starting to frame up a tutoring approach for our daughter. The more we research, the more it seems viable and not nearly as crazy as one might expect. I wouldn't expect genius outcomes, but I would expect at least a better chance at strong critical thinking.
Lovely to hear stuff like this Jonah, thanks for letting me know. And it sounds like you have a very healthy attitude in terms of expectations and approach
Great piece!
But if one want to reproduce this aristocratic tutoring and homeschool their children they themselves need to be geniuses and polymaths. Even if you hire personal tutor (teacher), this person should be a top in his or her field: if you'll hire your neighbor to homeschool your kid, expect that kid to do no better than in a standard school, or even worse.
And with that, this kind of education is still aristocratic - you need highly intelligent family, with lots of talented uncles, aunts, and friends, who are ready to spend time with a child to teach that child languages/sciences/math/etc
Fully agree, the issue with hiring someone, and education in general, is that you can't assess tutor's results unless you are a genius/polymath your-self and constantly spend time with the pupil monitoring his/her improvements. Losing time from a bad tutor to another bad tutor can be worse than going to school.
1:1 aristocratic tutoring is not a thing nowadays, hance you can't find tutors with a successful track record.
It is much easier to trust brands like Harvard, worst case scenario you still have a valuable degree.
I'm curious about the ‘failed’ instances of tutoring. E.g. the child never grew up to be so smart
Also curious if you have any thoughts on if tutoring affects g/IQ potential
Interesting thought on what "failure" looks in aristocratic tutoring. Keep in mind, tutoring seems to be main mode of education of aristocrats, and most were not geniuses. But I think that's too high a bar to expect as the standard outcome. For example, I think its unarguable that aristocrats were more intellectually inclined than our elites today - they loved salons, the arts, they were patrons and participants in intellectual culture. While the aristocracy certainly had its problems, not being intellectual wasn't one of them. So in that sense, perhaps a failed case of aristocratic tutoring looks more like someone who is not a genius, but is a genius-appreciator.
As for IQ, it does scale with more education (every year of school adds something like a couple IQ points, although I forget the exact statistic). Given that tutoring is highly effective, I suspect it would affect it. But, as I've said in other comments, I don't view IQ, beyond acting as a minimum bar, as being very predictive of genius.
If you putter through Wikipedia or another biographical source, you'll see that most prize winners, both of scientific and literary awards, had pretty conventional educations. They all had their Road to Damascus moments, often aided by a teacher who could see their talent and help them move forward. Sometimes it was just a teacher praising an essay or saying they might make a good chemist.
The premise of this essay seems to be that aristocratic tutoring would produce more geniuses, but is that really true?
I admit that there is an attraction to this style of education. It's a great way to make someone feel special, and many people like to feel special. It avoids intellectual competition which is considered unseemly in some circles. I've tutored a fair number of high school students, so I know that tutoring can be tailored to a student's strengths and weaknesses in a way that more general education cannot.
It also has a number of obvious flaws. How many tutors would it take, and can we get that many tutors? How do we make sure each student has the right tutor with the right interpersonal chemistry? How do we, as a society, use such a system to pass on shared knowledge to the next generation when a lot of parents choose this system precisely to avoid passing on shared knowledge?
Tutoring aristocrats doesn't really have a failure mode. Charles was still going to become king as long as he outlived his mother, tutoring or no tutoring. The whole point of being an aristocrat is not having to worry about success or failure unless one chooses to as a personal matter. There's a reason they called the humanities the liberal arts, it was an education for people who were liberated from having to earn their living. It was that way under the Greeks and Romans, and it was that way in Europe until fairly recently.
Under the Romans, the liberal arts were a class marker. When the Roman Empire collapsed and the Franks took over, the class marker was eating a lot of meat.
In discussing the two articles with my colleagues, friends, and family, I came across the same initial objection: that aristocratic tutoring deprives the pupil of socialization. Erik mentioned this as a top issue in his interview on Palladium. Let me just give a perspective I've developed and see what others think.
I believe we make an error of logic if we assume ipso facto that the schooling system as we know it provides superior social outcomes. It certainly provides more same-age child contact, i.e. if we judge socialization as being in large scale interactions with other kids of the same age then it probably will indeed be best. But I suspect that schools are asymptotically arriving at maximum child-to-teacher load out of economic neccessity. That means they always will put as many children as possible together under the guidance of a given number of adults. And our schooling system is segregated by year: those kids will all be born within 12 months of each other. The maximization of child count is at least orthogonal to quality of social skill acquisition. One would assume that the social skills increase from a group size of 1, but decline also at some larger size. I don't believe the group sizes are chosen based on socialization outcomes (they may not even be chosen based on learning outcomes).
But the age segragetion seems to be outright bad for socialization in a way that something like sex-segregation or ethnic group segregation would also be seen as simply not aligned with social skill formation. Most social skills benefit from observation, immitation, and intentional instruction: all things that mixed age groups would achieve better than single-age groups. I suspect that grouping by a single age is simply a technique to simplify group teaching, both by reducing the expertise needed of the teacher and maximizing the chances that an undifferentiated lesson will fall on pupils ready for it.
So, in summary, the "the child would be too alone" risk needs to be addressed both as a true concern (social skills need to be learned indeed, so be sure that's figured out), and as a red herring argument in favour of schooling. Schools may give you bigger groups of same-age kids, but that's not to say they give you benchmark-level social skill formation.