Is the world making fewer geniuses today, and if so, is it because we don't privately tutor like we used to?
In this episode, we'll explore the fascinating link between private tuition and the creation of historical geniuses, why some people think this idea is rubbish, and consider how modern education might evolve with technology.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part series on the loose theme of education.
[00:00:28] In case you missed it, in the last episode we talked about the crisis affecting British universities.
[00:00:34] In the next episode, we will look into our crystal ball and talk about some of the main ideas about the education system of the future.
[00:00:42] But today we are going to talk about private tutoring, 1:1 tuition, and the idea of genius.
[00:00:50] We have a lot to get through, so let’s get started.
[00:00:56] Let me start this episode by asking you to do something for me.
[00:01:01] Close your eyes and imagine a genius.
[00:01:04] Not a clever friend from your schooldays, or someone who is a whizz at Excel at your company, someone who is known around the world for being a genius.
[00:01:16] Got that person?
[00:01:18] Good.
[00:01:19] Now, let me hazard a guess and say that I imagine that person might have been born hundreds of years ago.
[00:01:28] Maybe you thought of someone like Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, or Marie Curie?
[00:01:35] A great composer like Mozart, maybe you would go even further back and name someone like Plato or Aristotle.
[00:01:43] The point is, when we think of genius, that person is typically long dead.
[00:01:51] Google any “list of geniuses”, and you will find very few that are still alive.
[00:01:58] And in March a couple of years ago, an American neuroscientist called Erik Hoel published an essay titled “Why we stopped making Einsteins”.
[00:02:10] I’ll add a link to it so you can read it for yourself if you like, but in this essay, he details how the world stopped producing geniuses, and asks the question of why.
[00:02:24] His conclusion is that it can all be traced back to the decline in private tutoring.
[00:02:31] In the past, Hoel explains, the children of affluent parents were often educated privately, on a one-on-one basis by a private tutor.
[00:02:43] These private tutors were often real subject-matter experts and well-known geniuses in their own right, and they would challenge and push their students to their limits.
[00:02:56] And students would achieve outsized results, they would make faster and better progress than anyone would do in a traditional classroom setting, and they would be much more likely to make the kind of scientific discoveries or artistic creations that would cause them to be hailed as geniuses.
[00:03:16] Everyone I named a couple of minutes ago: Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Mozart, Plato and Aristotle, they were all privately tutored, often by well-known great minds.
[00:03:31] In the case of Aristotle, as you may know, he was tutored by Plato.
[00:03:37] And Hoel gave this as the key reason for why the world seems to produce so few geniuses today, despite how much easier it is to access information and how much larger the world’s population is than it was 500 years ago.
[00:03:54] The essay even starts with this provocative statement: “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.”
[00:04:14] Now, let’s first talk about why Hoel believes that private tutoring was a key reason for the geniuses of the past, then we’ll talk about some of the criticisms of the essay, and what it all means.
[00:04:29] So, to start, is being privately tutored really so much better in terms of educational outcomes?
[00:04:38] In a word, yes.
[00:04:41] If you have ever had a 1:1 class, whether that’s a language class or a music class or any form of private tuition, you will no doubt have experienced this yourself.
[00:04:53] You learn significantly faster, you make more progress, and you can engage with the subject in a way that you can’t if you are in a classroom with 20 or 30 other people.
[00:05:06] And this isn’t just his opinion or my opinion; an influential American psychologist called Benjamin Bloom did extensive research into the subject, and in one famous study he reported that students who had received private tutoring, 1:1 lessons, performed two standard deviations better than those who hadn’t.
[00:05:31] Or, to translate that into plain English, those who had been privately tutored performed better than 98% of the population; they were in the top 2%.
[00:05:45] And most, not all, but most of the people we would now call geniuses had some form of private tutoring.
[00:05:54] So all it took was someone who was naturally gifted anyway to be pushed even further, lifted up even higher by a curious and attentive tutor, and ta-da, a genius would be created.
[00:06:09] Today, Hoel argues, we have very little private tutoring, or at least the private tutoring that exists has changed.
[00:06:19] For starters, a private tutor is very expensive, and very few families can afford one even if they want to.
[00:06:29] Secondly, knowledge for knowledge’s sake is no longer so in vogue.
[00:06:35] Instead, if a private tutor is hired to educate a child, it is typically to prepare them for a particular test that will get them a good grade and allow them to get into a particular school or university.
[00:06:50] The primary purpose of a private tutor in 2024 is rarely to expand a student’s intellectual ability; it is to teach them how to pass a test, to jump through a hoop.
[00:07:05] And, of course, very few people have any form of private tutoring. Most people go through a traditional schooling system, which involves classroom-based learning: one teacher and multiple students.
[00:07:20] Some children are still homeschooled, which is a form of private tutoring, but this is a serious minority and in most cases the parent is not a world-renowned expert in that field.
[00:07:35] Parents who homeschool their children are no doubt doing their best and are often capable and enthusiastic teachers, but it is a long way from Aristotle being tutored by Plato or Alexander The Great in turn being tutored by Aristotle.
[00:07:52] Private tutoring, Hoel argues, allows a child to develop their own intellectual interests, learn more quickly and efficiently and have a more rounded understanding of the world.
[00:08:06] He then contrasts this with the modern school system, which prioritises efficiency and equality of outcomes.
[00:08:15] The number of children in a classroom might be different, and as everyone knows, some teachers are more able to inspire and motivate their students, but the general format the world over is the same: students learn “subjects”, they pass “tests”, education is standardised.
[00:08:36] In most education systems, a student receives a grade, a mark, and they can easily be compared to everyone else in their age group.
[00:08:47] Some might receive the top mark, they might get an A* or 10/10.
[00:08:53] But it is unlikely that the teacher will take them to one side and give them a completely different set of reading, pushing them to achieve even more.
[00:09:02] They can’t do; teachers are busy enough as it is, and in most education systems the teacher’s job is to ensure that every student reaches a minimum standard, especially those who are struggling.
[00:09:17] As any teacher listening to this will know, the focus is typically on helping the students who are falling behind, making sure that everyone keeps up with the pace of the curriculum. The idea is to bring the whole class to a certain level of competence, rather than push the top students to excel beyond it.
[00:09:39] For most teachers, their main concern is ensuring that nobody is left behind, rather than fostering the next Einstein or Da Vinci.
[00:09:49] This is one of the major criticisms of the modern education system when it comes to the best and brightest students, and it’s one repeated by Hoel—it’s designed to create a sense of equality, to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities.
[00:10:05] But in doing so, it often sacrifices the potential of the few who could be exceptional.
[00:10:13] It lifts the majority to a certain level, but it doesn’t necessarily encourage or enable those with the greatest talent to reach their full potential.
[00:10:24] Would-be geniuses, the Mozarts and Leonardo Da Vincis of the 21st century, are stuck in a system that doesn’t push them hard enough.
[00:10:34] Now, Hoel does offer some words of hope, potential rays of sunshine.
[00:10:41] He is optimistic about the potential of technology, that AI could democratise access to private tutoring, and any child could be tutored by an AI-Einstein and talk philosophy with AI-Plato and then hone their painting skills with AI-Picasso.
[00:10:59] It is an interesting idea, of course, but going back to the opening line of Hoel’s essay, we have had unbridled access to free information via the Internet for twenty-plus years, and it hasn’t led to the explosion of knowledge and genius that some might have thought it would have.
[00:11:21] Now, this essay caused quite a splash when it was published.
[00:11:26] There were thousands of comments, other famous authors and educational researchers writing full responses to it, and the author went on to write two follow-up essays.
[00:11:38] It was a controversial subject, and the main criticisms of the arguments Hoel made are as follows.
[00:11:46] Firstly, that not all geniuses were privately tutored.
[00:11:51] People like Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison received little or no private tutoring, but would certainly rank on many people’s lists of geniuses. Hoel is looking at geniuses of the past and assuming that the reason they were “geniuses” is because of the fact they were privately tutored, but the reality is that there were privately tutored geniuses and there were non-privately tutored geniuses, there were both.
[00:12:19] Secondly, the way society is structured now makes the emergence of an individual genius far less likely. Work is far more collaborative, people work together on projects, and this means that it’s far less likely that a single person, a single researcher, will be singled out as “the genius” that created x, y or z.
[00:12:46] Discoveries are often incremental and collaborative, rather than the result of a single person’s work.
[00:12:54] Think of the Human Genome Project or CERN, these are genius-level developments but they are the result of large groups of people working together, not the work of a single individual.
[00:13:08] And on a related note, there is the comeback that nowadays we have “tall poppy syndrome”, where people don’t want to be singled out as being responsible for something. So even if there was one genius who pushed forward an entire project that resulted in a miraculous discovery, they will typically credit the team rather than the individual.
[00:13:33] Thirdly, there is the criticism that it’s not that we don’t make geniuses any more, but that good ideas that geniuses used to discover are becoming less easy to find.
[00:13:46] If you think of historical examples of when a genius “discovered” something, you might think of the legendary story of when Archimedes got into a bath, saw that the water level rose and therefore he realised that the amount of water that’s displaced by an object is directly proportional to its volume. And you might remember, he reportedly ran out of his house stark naked shouting “eureka”, or “I’ve found it”, in Greek.
[00:14:14] In other words, we have thousands of years of lived human experience and scientific experimentation so someone stumbling across an important discovery is much less likely.
[00:14:27] Instead, important discoveries are made over the course of months and years and involve lots of people, so there simply aren’t cases of a man seeing what happens when he gets into a bath or another one having an apple fall on his head.
[00:14:43] All the easy ideas have been discovered.
[00:14:47] And finally, one of the big criticisms of the essay is that there are still just as many geniuses, but capitalism and the modern globalised economy encourages them to work in other sectors where their genius is at best hidden from view and at worst channelled towards areas that are economically productive but do little to further global knowledge.
[00:15:13] There was a great quote from an early Facebook employee, and it was “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.“
[00:15:25] In other words, the top graduates from the best universities, the smartest people in the country who might otherwise be working on medical breakthroughs or particle physics, are being lured to companies like Facebook where they will work on problems like how to get people to log into the app more frequently or how to show people more relevant advertisements.
[00:15:48] If someone graduates from the top of their Astrophysics class at Harvard and can choose between applying for a grant to continue their studies or taking a six-figure salary offer from a technology company or a Wall Street bank, perfectly understandably, many opt for the latter.
[00:16:07] And in terms of the idea of encouraging private tutoring over traditional schooling, there are many arguments against it.
[00:16:16] First, the very reasonable criticism that a society in which every child is educated to a good standard is better than one in which most receive a poor education and a select few get all of the attention.
[00:16:31] Secondly, from a developmental point of view for the potential wonder kid, that it is preferable for a gifted child to be mixed with other children and to understand that everyone is different, that not everyone learns at the same pace.
[00:16:47] That’s a good thing, because that’s how the real world works, and a rounded education requires understanding your place within the world.
[00:16:58] I think one of the main reasons this essay was so controversial was because it got a lot of people thinking about the point of education.
[00:17:07] Is it to push every child to their intellectual limit, whatever that might be?
[00:17:13] If so, what does that mean for the schooling system?
[00:17:17] For those would-be geniuses, the Aristotles or Einsteins of the modern day, is it the responsibility of the school system to nurture their inner genius?
[00:17:28] Or does this responsibility lie with the parents?
[00:17:31] Or is nurturing genius simply not as important as it used to be?
[00:17:38] And looking to the future, as we will do in much more detail in the next part of this mini-series, we are presented with both promise and challenge.
[00:17:49] Technology like AI might democratise access to personalised learning, giving every child the opportunity to have their intellectual curiosity sparked, as private tutors once did for the geniuses of the past.
[00:18:03] But how would that work in practice, how would that fit into the constraints of the education system we have today?
[00:18:10] Will it become two-tiered, with would-be geniuses racing ahead while everyone else is left behind?
[00:18:18] What does that mean in terms of educational systems, budgets, and resource allocation?
[00:18:26] Who knows, but the fate of the next generation of geniuses hangs in the balance.
[00:18:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on private tutors and the decline of geniuses.
[00:18:40] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it might have made you think a little more about the nature of education.
[00:18:48] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, especially as I know we have so many teachers and people involved in education in this community.
[00:18:57] So, let me know what you think.
[00:18:59] Do you agree with the arguments Hoel makes? Have you ever taught a student who had genius-like qualities, and how did you manage it?
[00:19:08] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:11] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:20] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:25] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part series on the loose theme of education.
[00:00:28] In case you missed it, in the last episode we talked about the crisis affecting British universities.
[00:00:34] In the next episode, we will look into our crystal ball and talk about some of the main ideas about the education system of the future.
[00:00:42] But today we are going to talk about private tutoring, 1:1 tuition, and the idea of genius.
[00:00:50] We have a lot to get through, so let’s get started.
[00:00:56] Let me start this episode by asking you to do something for me.
[00:01:01] Close your eyes and imagine a genius.
[00:01:04] Not a clever friend from your schooldays, or someone who is a whizz at Excel at your company, someone who is known around the world for being a genius.
[00:01:16] Got that person?
[00:01:18] Good.
[00:01:19] Now, let me hazard a guess and say that I imagine that person might have been born hundreds of years ago.
[00:01:28] Maybe you thought of someone like Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, or Marie Curie?
[00:01:35] A great composer like Mozart, maybe you would go even further back and name someone like Plato or Aristotle.
[00:01:43] The point is, when we think of genius, that person is typically long dead.
[00:01:51] Google any “list of geniuses”, and you will find very few that are still alive.
[00:01:58] And in March a couple of years ago, an American neuroscientist called Erik Hoel published an essay titled “Why we stopped making Einsteins”.
[00:02:10] I’ll add a link to it so you can read it for yourself if you like, but in this essay, he details how the world stopped producing geniuses, and asks the question of why.
[00:02:24] His conclusion is that it can all be traced back to the decline in private tutoring.
[00:02:31] In the past, Hoel explains, the children of affluent parents were often educated privately, on a one-on-one basis by a private tutor.
[00:02:43] These private tutors were often real subject-matter experts and well-known geniuses in their own right, and they would challenge and push their students to their limits.
[00:02:56] And students would achieve outsized results, they would make faster and better progress than anyone would do in a traditional classroom setting, and they would be much more likely to make the kind of scientific discoveries or artistic creations that would cause them to be hailed as geniuses.
[00:03:16] Everyone I named a couple of minutes ago: Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Mozart, Plato and Aristotle, they were all privately tutored, often by well-known great minds.
[00:03:31] In the case of Aristotle, as you may know, he was tutored by Plato.
[00:03:37] And Hoel gave this as the key reason for why the world seems to produce so few geniuses today, despite how much easier it is to access information and how much larger the world’s population is than it was 500 years ago.
[00:03:54] The essay even starts with this provocative statement: “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.”
[00:04:14] Now, let’s first talk about why Hoel believes that private tutoring was a key reason for the geniuses of the past, then we’ll talk about some of the criticisms of the essay, and what it all means.
[00:04:29] So, to start, is being privately tutored really so much better in terms of educational outcomes?
[00:04:38] In a word, yes.
[00:04:41] If you have ever had a 1:1 class, whether that’s a language class or a music class or any form of private tuition, you will no doubt have experienced this yourself.
[00:04:53] You learn significantly faster, you make more progress, and you can engage with the subject in a way that you can’t if you are in a classroom with 20 or 30 other people.
[00:05:06] And this isn’t just his opinion or my opinion; an influential American psychologist called Benjamin Bloom did extensive research into the subject, and in one famous study he reported that students who had received private tutoring, 1:1 lessons, performed two standard deviations better than those who hadn’t.
[00:05:31] Or, to translate that into plain English, those who had been privately tutored performed better than 98% of the population; they were in the top 2%.
[00:05:45] And most, not all, but most of the people we would now call geniuses had some form of private tutoring.
[00:05:54] So all it took was someone who was naturally gifted anyway to be pushed even further, lifted up even higher by a curious and attentive tutor, and ta-da, a genius would be created.
[00:06:09] Today, Hoel argues, we have very little private tutoring, or at least the private tutoring that exists has changed.
[00:06:19] For starters, a private tutor is very expensive, and very few families can afford one even if they want to.
[00:06:29] Secondly, knowledge for knowledge’s sake is no longer so in vogue.
[00:06:35] Instead, if a private tutor is hired to educate a child, it is typically to prepare them for a particular test that will get them a good grade and allow them to get into a particular school or university.
[00:06:50] The primary purpose of a private tutor in 2024 is rarely to expand a student’s intellectual ability; it is to teach them how to pass a test, to jump through a hoop.
[00:07:05] And, of course, very few people have any form of private tutoring. Most people go through a traditional schooling system, which involves classroom-based learning: one teacher and multiple students.
[00:07:20] Some children are still homeschooled, which is a form of private tutoring, but this is a serious minority and in most cases the parent is not a world-renowned expert in that field.
[00:07:35] Parents who homeschool their children are no doubt doing their best and are often capable and enthusiastic teachers, but it is a long way from Aristotle being tutored by Plato or Alexander The Great in turn being tutored by Aristotle.
[00:07:52] Private tutoring, Hoel argues, allows a child to develop their own intellectual interests, learn more quickly and efficiently and have a more rounded understanding of the world.
[00:08:06] He then contrasts this with the modern school system, which prioritises efficiency and equality of outcomes.
[00:08:15] The number of children in a classroom might be different, and as everyone knows, some teachers are more able to inspire and motivate their students, but the general format the world over is the same: students learn “subjects”, they pass “tests”, education is standardised.
[00:08:36] In most education systems, a student receives a grade, a mark, and they can easily be compared to everyone else in their age group.
[00:08:47] Some might receive the top mark, they might get an A* or 10/10.
[00:08:53] But it is unlikely that the teacher will take them to one side and give them a completely different set of reading, pushing them to achieve even more.
[00:09:02] They can’t do; teachers are busy enough as it is, and in most education systems the teacher’s job is to ensure that every student reaches a minimum standard, especially those who are struggling.
[00:09:17] As any teacher listening to this will know, the focus is typically on helping the students who are falling behind, making sure that everyone keeps up with the pace of the curriculum. The idea is to bring the whole class to a certain level of competence, rather than push the top students to excel beyond it.
[00:09:39] For most teachers, their main concern is ensuring that nobody is left behind, rather than fostering the next Einstein or Da Vinci.
[00:09:49] This is one of the major criticisms of the modern education system when it comes to the best and brightest students, and it’s one repeated by Hoel—it’s designed to create a sense of equality, to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities.
[00:10:05] But in doing so, it often sacrifices the potential of the few who could be exceptional.
[00:10:13] It lifts the majority to a certain level, but it doesn’t necessarily encourage or enable those with the greatest talent to reach their full potential.
[00:10:24] Would-be geniuses, the Mozarts and Leonardo Da Vincis of the 21st century, are stuck in a system that doesn’t push them hard enough.
[00:10:34] Now, Hoel does offer some words of hope, potential rays of sunshine.
[00:10:41] He is optimistic about the potential of technology, that AI could democratise access to private tutoring, and any child could be tutored by an AI-Einstein and talk philosophy with AI-Plato and then hone their painting skills with AI-Picasso.
[00:10:59] It is an interesting idea, of course, but going back to the opening line of Hoel’s essay, we have had unbridled access to free information via the Internet for twenty-plus years, and it hasn’t led to the explosion of knowledge and genius that some might have thought it would have.
[00:11:21] Now, this essay caused quite a splash when it was published.
[00:11:26] There were thousands of comments, other famous authors and educational researchers writing full responses to it, and the author went on to write two follow-up essays.
[00:11:38] It was a controversial subject, and the main criticisms of the arguments Hoel made are as follows.
[00:11:46] Firstly, that not all geniuses were privately tutored.
[00:11:51] People like Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison received little or no private tutoring, but would certainly rank on many people’s lists of geniuses. Hoel is looking at geniuses of the past and assuming that the reason they were “geniuses” is because of the fact they were privately tutored, but the reality is that there were privately tutored geniuses and there were non-privately tutored geniuses, there were both.
[00:12:19] Secondly, the way society is structured now makes the emergence of an individual genius far less likely. Work is far more collaborative, people work together on projects, and this means that it’s far less likely that a single person, a single researcher, will be singled out as “the genius” that created x, y or z.
[00:12:46] Discoveries are often incremental and collaborative, rather than the result of a single person’s work.
[00:12:54] Think of the Human Genome Project or CERN, these are genius-level developments but they are the result of large groups of people working together, not the work of a single individual.
[00:13:08] And on a related note, there is the comeback that nowadays we have “tall poppy syndrome”, where people don’t want to be singled out as being responsible for something. So even if there was one genius who pushed forward an entire project that resulted in a miraculous discovery, they will typically credit the team rather than the individual.
[00:13:33] Thirdly, there is the criticism that it’s not that we don’t make geniuses any more, but that good ideas that geniuses used to discover are becoming less easy to find.
[00:13:46] If you think of historical examples of when a genius “discovered” something, you might think of the legendary story of when Archimedes got into a bath, saw that the water level rose and therefore he realised that the amount of water that’s displaced by an object is directly proportional to its volume. And you might remember, he reportedly ran out of his house stark naked shouting “eureka”, or “I’ve found it”, in Greek.
[00:14:14] In other words, we have thousands of years of lived human experience and scientific experimentation so someone stumbling across an important discovery is much less likely.
[00:14:27] Instead, important discoveries are made over the course of months and years and involve lots of people, so there simply aren’t cases of a man seeing what happens when he gets into a bath or another one having an apple fall on his head.
[00:14:43] All the easy ideas have been discovered.
[00:14:47] And finally, one of the big criticisms of the essay is that there are still just as many geniuses, but capitalism and the modern globalised economy encourages them to work in other sectors where their genius is at best hidden from view and at worst channelled towards areas that are economically productive but do little to further global knowledge.
[00:15:13] There was a great quote from an early Facebook employee, and it was “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.“
[00:15:25] In other words, the top graduates from the best universities, the smartest people in the country who might otherwise be working on medical breakthroughs or particle physics, are being lured to companies like Facebook where they will work on problems like how to get people to log into the app more frequently or how to show people more relevant advertisements.
[00:15:48] If someone graduates from the top of their Astrophysics class at Harvard and can choose between applying for a grant to continue their studies or taking a six-figure salary offer from a technology company or a Wall Street bank, perfectly understandably, many opt for the latter.
[00:16:07] And in terms of the idea of encouraging private tutoring over traditional schooling, there are many arguments against it.
[00:16:16] First, the very reasonable criticism that a society in which every child is educated to a good standard is better than one in which most receive a poor education and a select few get all of the attention.
[00:16:31] Secondly, from a developmental point of view for the potential wonder kid, that it is preferable for a gifted child to be mixed with other children and to understand that everyone is different, that not everyone learns at the same pace.
[00:16:47] That’s a good thing, because that’s how the real world works, and a rounded education requires understanding your place within the world.
[00:16:58] I think one of the main reasons this essay was so controversial was because it got a lot of people thinking about the point of education.
[00:17:07] Is it to push every child to their intellectual limit, whatever that might be?
[00:17:13] If so, what does that mean for the schooling system?
[00:17:17] For those would-be geniuses, the Aristotles or Einsteins of the modern day, is it the responsibility of the school system to nurture their inner genius?
[00:17:28] Or does this responsibility lie with the parents?
[00:17:31] Or is nurturing genius simply not as important as it used to be?
[00:17:38] And looking to the future, as we will do in much more detail in the next part of this mini-series, we are presented with both promise and challenge.
[00:17:49] Technology like AI might democratise access to personalised learning, giving every child the opportunity to have their intellectual curiosity sparked, as private tutors once did for the geniuses of the past.
[00:18:03] But how would that work in practice, how would that fit into the constraints of the education system we have today?
[00:18:10] Will it become two-tiered, with would-be geniuses racing ahead while everyone else is left behind?
[00:18:18] What does that mean in terms of educational systems, budgets, and resource allocation?
[00:18:26] Who knows, but the fate of the next generation of geniuses hangs in the balance.
[00:18:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on private tutors and the decline of geniuses.
[00:18:40] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it might have made you think a little more about the nature of education.
[00:18:48] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, especially as I know we have so many teachers and people involved in education in this community.
[00:18:57] So, let me know what you think.
[00:18:59] Do you agree with the arguments Hoel makes? Have you ever taught a student who had genius-like qualities, and how did you manage it?
[00:19:08] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:11] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:20] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:25] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part series on the loose theme of education.
[00:00:28] In case you missed it, in the last episode we talked about the crisis affecting British universities.
[00:00:34] In the next episode, we will look into our crystal ball and talk about some of the main ideas about the education system of the future.
[00:00:42] But today we are going to talk about private tutoring, 1:1 tuition, and the idea of genius.
[00:00:50] We have a lot to get through, so let’s get started.
[00:00:56] Let me start this episode by asking you to do something for me.
[00:01:01] Close your eyes and imagine a genius.
[00:01:04] Not a clever friend from your schooldays, or someone who is a whizz at Excel at your company, someone who is known around the world for being a genius.
[00:01:16] Got that person?
[00:01:18] Good.
[00:01:19] Now, let me hazard a guess and say that I imagine that person might have been born hundreds of years ago.
[00:01:28] Maybe you thought of someone like Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, or Marie Curie?
[00:01:35] A great composer like Mozart, maybe you would go even further back and name someone like Plato or Aristotle.
[00:01:43] The point is, when we think of genius, that person is typically long dead.
[00:01:51] Google any “list of geniuses”, and you will find very few that are still alive.
[00:01:58] And in March a couple of years ago, an American neuroscientist called Erik Hoel published an essay titled “Why we stopped making Einsteins”.
[00:02:10] I’ll add a link to it so you can read it for yourself if you like, but in this essay, he details how the world stopped producing geniuses, and asks the question of why.
[00:02:24] His conclusion is that it can all be traced back to the decline in private tutoring.
[00:02:31] In the past, Hoel explains, the children of affluent parents were often educated privately, on a one-on-one basis by a private tutor.
[00:02:43] These private tutors were often real subject-matter experts and well-known geniuses in their own right, and they would challenge and push their students to their limits.
[00:02:56] And students would achieve outsized results, they would make faster and better progress than anyone would do in a traditional classroom setting, and they would be much more likely to make the kind of scientific discoveries or artistic creations that would cause them to be hailed as geniuses.
[00:03:16] Everyone I named a couple of minutes ago: Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Mozart, Plato and Aristotle, they were all privately tutored, often by well-known great minds.
[00:03:31] In the case of Aristotle, as you may know, he was tutored by Plato.
[00:03:37] And Hoel gave this as the key reason for why the world seems to produce so few geniuses today, despite how much easier it is to access information and how much larger the world’s population is than it was 500 years ago.
[00:03:54] The essay even starts with this provocative statement: “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.”
[00:04:14] Now, let’s first talk about why Hoel believes that private tutoring was a key reason for the geniuses of the past, then we’ll talk about some of the criticisms of the essay, and what it all means.
[00:04:29] So, to start, is being privately tutored really so much better in terms of educational outcomes?
[00:04:38] In a word, yes.
[00:04:41] If you have ever had a 1:1 class, whether that’s a language class or a music class or any form of private tuition, you will no doubt have experienced this yourself.
[00:04:53] You learn significantly faster, you make more progress, and you can engage with the subject in a way that you can’t if you are in a classroom with 20 or 30 other people.
[00:05:06] And this isn’t just his opinion or my opinion; an influential American psychologist called Benjamin Bloom did extensive research into the subject, and in one famous study he reported that students who had received private tutoring, 1:1 lessons, performed two standard deviations better than those who hadn’t.
[00:05:31] Or, to translate that into plain English, those who had been privately tutored performed better than 98% of the population; they were in the top 2%.
[00:05:45] And most, not all, but most of the people we would now call geniuses had some form of private tutoring.
[00:05:54] So all it took was someone who was naturally gifted anyway to be pushed even further, lifted up even higher by a curious and attentive tutor, and ta-da, a genius would be created.
[00:06:09] Today, Hoel argues, we have very little private tutoring, or at least the private tutoring that exists has changed.
[00:06:19] For starters, a private tutor is very expensive, and very few families can afford one even if they want to.
[00:06:29] Secondly, knowledge for knowledge’s sake is no longer so in vogue.
[00:06:35] Instead, if a private tutor is hired to educate a child, it is typically to prepare them for a particular test that will get them a good grade and allow them to get into a particular school or university.
[00:06:50] The primary purpose of a private tutor in 2024 is rarely to expand a student’s intellectual ability; it is to teach them how to pass a test, to jump through a hoop.
[00:07:05] And, of course, very few people have any form of private tutoring. Most people go through a traditional schooling system, which involves classroom-based learning: one teacher and multiple students.
[00:07:20] Some children are still homeschooled, which is a form of private tutoring, but this is a serious minority and in most cases the parent is not a world-renowned expert in that field.
[00:07:35] Parents who homeschool their children are no doubt doing their best and are often capable and enthusiastic teachers, but it is a long way from Aristotle being tutored by Plato or Alexander The Great in turn being tutored by Aristotle.
[00:07:52] Private tutoring, Hoel argues, allows a child to develop their own intellectual interests, learn more quickly and efficiently and have a more rounded understanding of the world.
[00:08:06] He then contrasts this with the modern school system, which prioritises efficiency and equality of outcomes.
[00:08:15] The number of children in a classroom might be different, and as everyone knows, some teachers are more able to inspire and motivate their students, but the general format the world over is the same: students learn “subjects”, they pass “tests”, education is standardised.
[00:08:36] In most education systems, a student receives a grade, a mark, and they can easily be compared to everyone else in their age group.
[00:08:47] Some might receive the top mark, they might get an A* or 10/10.
[00:08:53] But it is unlikely that the teacher will take them to one side and give them a completely different set of reading, pushing them to achieve even more.
[00:09:02] They can’t do; teachers are busy enough as it is, and in most education systems the teacher’s job is to ensure that every student reaches a minimum standard, especially those who are struggling.
[00:09:17] As any teacher listening to this will know, the focus is typically on helping the students who are falling behind, making sure that everyone keeps up with the pace of the curriculum. The idea is to bring the whole class to a certain level of competence, rather than push the top students to excel beyond it.
[00:09:39] For most teachers, their main concern is ensuring that nobody is left behind, rather than fostering the next Einstein or Da Vinci.
[00:09:49] This is one of the major criticisms of the modern education system when it comes to the best and brightest students, and it’s one repeated by Hoel—it’s designed to create a sense of equality, to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities.
[00:10:05] But in doing so, it often sacrifices the potential of the few who could be exceptional.
[00:10:13] It lifts the majority to a certain level, but it doesn’t necessarily encourage or enable those with the greatest talent to reach their full potential.
[00:10:24] Would-be geniuses, the Mozarts and Leonardo Da Vincis of the 21st century, are stuck in a system that doesn’t push them hard enough.
[00:10:34] Now, Hoel does offer some words of hope, potential rays of sunshine.
[00:10:41] He is optimistic about the potential of technology, that AI could democratise access to private tutoring, and any child could be tutored by an AI-Einstein and talk philosophy with AI-Plato and then hone their painting skills with AI-Picasso.
[00:10:59] It is an interesting idea, of course, but going back to the opening line of Hoel’s essay, we have had unbridled access to free information via the Internet for twenty-plus years, and it hasn’t led to the explosion of knowledge and genius that some might have thought it would have.
[00:11:21] Now, this essay caused quite a splash when it was published.
[00:11:26] There were thousands of comments, other famous authors and educational researchers writing full responses to it, and the author went on to write two follow-up essays.
[00:11:38] It was a controversial subject, and the main criticisms of the arguments Hoel made are as follows.
[00:11:46] Firstly, that not all geniuses were privately tutored.
[00:11:51] People like Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison received little or no private tutoring, but would certainly rank on many people’s lists of geniuses. Hoel is looking at geniuses of the past and assuming that the reason they were “geniuses” is because of the fact they were privately tutored, but the reality is that there were privately tutored geniuses and there were non-privately tutored geniuses, there were both.
[00:12:19] Secondly, the way society is structured now makes the emergence of an individual genius far less likely. Work is far more collaborative, people work together on projects, and this means that it’s far less likely that a single person, a single researcher, will be singled out as “the genius” that created x, y or z.
[00:12:46] Discoveries are often incremental and collaborative, rather than the result of a single person’s work.
[00:12:54] Think of the Human Genome Project or CERN, these are genius-level developments but they are the result of large groups of people working together, not the work of a single individual.
[00:13:08] And on a related note, there is the comeback that nowadays we have “tall poppy syndrome”, where people don’t want to be singled out as being responsible for something. So even if there was one genius who pushed forward an entire project that resulted in a miraculous discovery, they will typically credit the team rather than the individual.
[00:13:33] Thirdly, there is the criticism that it’s not that we don’t make geniuses any more, but that good ideas that geniuses used to discover are becoming less easy to find.
[00:13:46] If you think of historical examples of when a genius “discovered” something, you might think of the legendary story of when Archimedes got into a bath, saw that the water level rose and therefore he realised that the amount of water that’s displaced by an object is directly proportional to its volume. And you might remember, he reportedly ran out of his house stark naked shouting “eureka”, or “I’ve found it”, in Greek.
[00:14:14] In other words, we have thousands of years of lived human experience and scientific experimentation so someone stumbling across an important discovery is much less likely.
[00:14:27] Instead, important discoveries are made over the course of months and years and involve lots of people, so there simply aren’t cases of a man seeing what happens when he gets into a bath or another one having an apple fall on his head.
[00:14:43] All the easy ideas have been discovered.
[00:14:47] And finally, one of the big criticisms of the essay is that there are still just as many geniuses, but capitalism and the modern globalised economy encourages them to work in other sectors where their genius is at best hidden from view and at worst channelled towards areas that are economically productive but do little to further global knowledge.
[00:15:13] There was a great quote from an early Facebook employee, and it was “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.“
[00:15:25] In other words, the top graduates from the best universities, the smartest people in the country who might otherwise be working on medical breakthroughs or particle physics, are being lured to companies like Facebook where they will work on problems like how to get people to log into the app more frequently or how to show people more relevant advertisements.
[00:15:48] If someone graduates from the top of their Astrophysics class at Harvard and can choose between applying for a grant to continue their studies or taking a six-figure salary offer from a technology company or a Wall Street bank, perfectly understandably, many opt for the latter.
[00:16:07] And in terms of the idea of encouraging private tutoring over traditional schooling, there are many arguments against it.
[00:16:16] First, the very reasonable criticism that a society in which every child is educated to a good standard is better than one in which most receive a poor education and a select few get all of the attention.
[00:16:31] Secondly, from a developmental point of view for the potential wonder kid, that it is preferable for a gifted child to be mixed with other children and to understand that everyone is different, that not everyone learns at the same pace.
[00:16:47] That’s a good thing, because that’s how the real world works, and a rounded education requires understanding your place within the world.
[00:16:58] I think one of the main reasons this essay was so controversial was because it got a lot of people thinking about the point of education.
[00:17:07] Is it to push every child to their intellectual limit, whatever that might be?
[00:17:13] If so, what does that mean for the schooling system?
[00:17:17] For those would-be geniuses, the Aristotles or Einsteins of the modern day, is it the responsibility of the school system to nurture their inner genius?
[00:17:28] Or does this responsibility lie with the parents?
[00:17:31] Or is nurturing genius simply not as important as it used to be?
[00:17:38] And looking to the future, as we will do in much more detail in the next part of this mini-series, we are presented with both promise and challenge.
[00:17:49] Technology like AI might democratise access to personalised learning, giving every child the opportunity to have their intellectual curiosity sparked, as private tutors once did for the geniuses of the past.
[00:18:03] But how would that work in practice, how would that fit into the constraints of the education system we have today?
[00:18:10] Will it become two-tiered, with would-be geniuses racing ahead while everyone else is left behind?
[00:18:18] What does that mean in terms of educational systems, budgets, and resource allocation?
[00:18:26] Who knows, but the fate of the next generation of geniuses hangs in the balance.
[00:18:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on private tutors and the decline of geniuses.
[00:18:40] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it might have made you think a little more about the nature of education.
[00:18:48] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, especially as I know we have so many teachers and people involved in education in this community.
[00:18:57] So, let me know what you think.
[00:18:59] Do you agree with the arguments Hoel makes? Have you ever taught a student who had genius-like qualities, and how did you manage it?
[00:19:08] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:11] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:20] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:25] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
