Well-resourced families did not fret because they still were able to hire supplemental tutors, ensuring that the personalisation and mastery still happened. A student does not quite understand exponents yet? Too bad it’s time to move on to logarithms-even though it is impossible to learn logarithms without proficiency in exponents. Batch the students by age move them at a fixed pace through standardised curriculums assess what is retained periodically and sort the “product” (that is, the students) after 10-12 years into career tracks based on these assessments. Instead we borrowed ideas of manufacturing from the Industrial Revolution to give a much broader group of students something much more cost-effective. Throughout most of human history, those lucky enough to get an education had some variation of this personalised, mastery-based experience.įast-forward to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the utopian idea of free public education began to be introduced, and it was not economically possible to give everyone a personal tutor.

Alexander already has a knack for military tactics? No need to bore him with things he already knows we can move on to more stimulating things. We will just spend a little more time on it.

Young Alexander is still having some trouble understanding Pythagoras’s theorem? No problem. I imagine that Aristotle did what any great tutor would do: focus on discussion and practice, and tweak interaction based on what the student needs most. Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor. The tools now exist to alleviate the tension between personalisation, mastery and costįew people received a proper education in the 4th century BC, but if you were, say, the son of the King of Macedonia, yours was better than most. We have a toolkit that allows us to give broad access to best practices from the past: personalisation and mastery learning. What is more, a less educated population is one that is more susceptible to instability and demagoguery, which harms everyone.Īlthough this moment may be deeply unsettling, we can look to history for guidance on how to make things better. It is a leading indicator of hundreds of millions of young people not being able to lead purposeful lives that allow them to participate in the economy and society as a whole. This is not just an intellectual debate about declining test scores.

Salman khan academy