As I’ve written about previously in “Why we stopped making Einsteins,” elite education used to be very different than our lecture-based system. Many famous names were instead taught via what I dubbed “aristocratic tutoring,” people like John von Neumann, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, Ada Lovelace, or Charles Darwin. In fact, universities like Cambridge used to run almost entirely on tutoring, not lectures. Probably because they knew what scientific research has shown: that one-on-one tutoring is the most effective method of education. I can see this historical change in education clearly even in how the initial steps of reading are taught: too often, the modern lecture-based education system spills into teaching outside of school. Therefore other popular methods often still mimic classrooms, failing to take advantage of the flexibilities and benefits of one-on-one tutoring. (View Highlight)
