Isegoria

The key to aristocratic tutoring, Erik Hoel suggests, is not the schedule of tutoring, nor even what subjects are covered:

Rather, the key ingredients, judged from some of the most stand-out and well-documented accounts, are (a) the total amount of one-on-one time the child has with intellectually-engaged adults; (b) a strong overseer who guides the education at a high level with the clear intent of producing an exceptional mind (in Mill’s case, his father, in Russell’s case, his grandmother, in Hamilton’s case, Knox, and we can look to modern examples like mathematician Terence Tao, whose parents did the same); (c) plenty of free time, i.e., less tutoring hours in the day than traditional school; (d) teaching that avoids the standard lecture-based system of unnecessary memorization and testing and instead encourages thinking from first principles, discussions, writing, debates, or simply overviewing the fundamentals together; (e) in these activities, it is often best to let the student lead (e.g., writing an essay or poetry, or learning a proof); (f) intellectual life needs to be taken abnormally seriously by either the tutors or the family at large; (g) there is early specialization of geniuses, often into the very fields for which they would become notable (even, e.g., Hamilton’s childhood experience with logistics making him an ideal chief of staff for Washington’s war); (g) at some point the tutoring transitions toward an apprenticeship model, often quite early, which takes the form of project-based collaboration, such as producing a scientific paper or monograph or book; (h) a final stage of becoming pupil to another genius at the height of their powers, often as young adulthood is only beginning (Mill with the early utilitarians like the Bethams and his father, Russell with Whitehead, Hamilton with Washington). From there, they are off and running. Earlier on in history, they often eventually became tutors themselves, as if they were an organism completing a life-cycle and returning to the place of its origins (e.g., Huygens, who was tutored by famous scientists of the day, tutoring Leibniz).

The sympathetic opposition explains how and why to be ladylike — ostensibly for women with (high-functioning) autism:

So, imagine you’re a young woman. (Apparently everyone likes to do that.) You are starting to possess some degree of sexual attraction, which impacts others around you. Also, you live in a social world, and you want things from other people. At the same time, you are ambivalent about your powers of sexual attraction, which sometimes cause people to behave threateningly or at least unpleasantly towards you, and definitely put you in a lot of awkward situations you didnt ask for. And also because you’re being judged, and it’s hard to get a break. What to do?

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Being overtly sexy hijacks people’s attention on a level that they don’t have much control over — and the overt hate/dislike that they respond with is an attempt to wrest back some control over their responses. It’s simple epistemic hygiene, and the girls don’t like it because they feel competed with and defected against, and they feel it’s unfair and unpleasant. When they feel unfairly competed against sexually, they are going to respond by upping the social competition, and it will suck for people like us, because we have already established we are not good at that.

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Acting like a lady is leveraging your attractiveness (whatever degree of it you might have) while also giving yourself/the people you’re interacting with, plausible deniability that you’re leveraging your attractiveness.

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Here’s the Dune quote I promised, by the way:

The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. When youth and beauty are gone, she will find that the place between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness.

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When you’re sexually attractive to a man you’re talking to, it hijacks some of his attention, and it’s not easy for him to wrest it back. Sorry for sounding like a middle aged schoolteacher explaining dress code to you.

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Consider reading old etiquette books — old ones, not recent ones — and thinking about how the rules worked. they won’t always explain the rules in a way that’s available to you, but thinking about why those rules were rules will be much easier than trying to deduce how to be considerate from first principles.

The Slime Mold Time Mold crew think that Erik Hoel is right that historical tutoring was better than education today:

It’s no secret that school sux. It’s not that tutoring is good, it’s that mechanized schooling is really bad. If we got rid of formal 20th century K-12 education, and did homeschooling / unschooling / let kids work at the costco, we would get most of the benefits of tutoring without all the overhead and inequality.

Our personal educational philosophy is that, for the most part, the most important thing you can do for your students is expose them to things they wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Sort of in the spirit of, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. So K-12 education gums up the works by making bad recommendations, having students spend a lot of time on mediocre stuff, and keeping them so busy they can’t follow up on the better recommendations from friends and family.

From this perspective, mechanized schooling is actually a net negative — it is worse than nothing, and if we just let kids run around hitting each other with sticks or whatever, we would get more geniuses.

Growing up on the Swedish seaside, Henrik Karlsson had a five-minute walk to four open learning facilities, not counting the library and the youth center:

One of the premises was an abandoned church that my friends and I used as a recording studio; we’d renovated it ourselves with funding from a study association. In another, I learned French from an émigré of Montpellier. We arranged public lectures — once, to our great surprise, we even managed to book then general secretary of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon for a lecture in Uppsala. I analyzed Soviet cinema with a group of whom an unsettling number sang Sång för Stalin before the screenings.

Since leaving Sweden, I have realized that not everyone grows up like this. And I miss it. In fact, if the whole of Sweden was about to burn down and I could only save one thing, I might grab just folkbildningsrörelsen.

Folkbildningsrörelsen: that is the name we have for this movement of self-organized study groups, resource centers, maker spaces, public lectures, and free retreats for personal development.

These types of things exist in other countries too — but not at the same scale. Or even close.

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In the 19th century, when these houses and the financing that enables them began to be built out, the main impetus came from the German Bildung tradition.

Bildung etymologically refers to shaping yourself in the image (das Bild) of God. God in this context should be imagined as a highly self-possessed spectral being — in control of its emotions, with mind and heart in harmony, and willing to take individual moral responsibility. Think Bertrand Russell but less atheist, and sitting on a cloud.

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In the 19th century, the popular education movement started to grow into a significant societal force. This began with the creation of so-called folk high schools (folkhögskolor). These first emerged in Denmark, in Ryslinge, where Christen Kold in 1851 started a school based on N.F.S. Grundtvig’s idea of an ungraded, discussion-focused institution for higher education, aimed at the lower classes.

Folk high schools were located in scenic areas — not so much to be romantic retreats for city dwellers but to be close to the farmers who were their main clientele. In The Nordic Secret, Andersen and Björkman argue that folk high schools were retreats for ego development along lines similar to Robert Kegan’s. It was about creating the conditions for people who had lived in simple small-scale communities to develop the knowledge and psychological complexity required to navigate modern society. Much emphasis was placed on discussions, practical skills and simulations.

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They arranged role-playing events where workers and farmers played out committee meetings and other arcane parts of the political process. This meant that once they got the vote and started sweeping into office, the worker representatives out-maneuvered the representatives from the upper classes, to the great surprise of many who had argued against democracy on the grounds that it would lead to a flood of unwashed plebeians. The secretaries in the government office, who were in the habit of grading political representatives for their professionalism, left good marks for the early workers’ representatives.

At their peak, 10 percent of young adults in rural areas choose to attend folk high schools. Andersen and Björkman’s thesis is that this created a critical mass, well distributed in the population, that had the intellectual and emotional tools needed to effectively navigate a complex society. This, in turn, would explain the rapid transition that the Nordic countries made, from being the poorest in Europe in the 1850s to being the happiest, most equal, and nearly richest societies in the world eighty years later. I think that is overplaying the importance of the folk high school – but it does gesture at the transformative impact that popular education had on large swaths of the population.

And it was only just beginning.

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Olsson had returned from a trip to the United States where he had observed the success of the Chautauqua movement, an educational spectacle with speakers, showmen, and preachers, which Theodore Roosevelt, quite aptly, called “the most American thing in America”. Now Olsson was trying to figure out how to bring these ideas to his Good Templar lodge in Lund, to help his fellow Good Templars spread temperance.

What he came up with was a Scandinavian, minimalist version of Chautauqua, which he called a study circle. The study circle, Olsson envisaged, would be made up of equals and elect a leader from among its members. It would take literature as its starting point, and help its members acquire knowledge in the course of free conversation. It was, as all good memes are, a very simple idea. And it was cheap. The members (numbering between 5 and 20) could, if necessary, meet at home and would choose their own study material. That created an economically viable form of education for the working class.

And it was made even more viable three years later, when the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, voted to give grants for the purchase of books, on the condition that the books were made available to the general public1.

Another factor behind the success of study circles was their focus on communal self-improvement. Study circles were a child of the temperance movement — a movement that neither sought collective power, like the unions, nor self-improvement for the individual, but rather encouraged people to improve to serve their fellow human beings. This focus on communal self-improvement seems to have provided momentum to the movement. It also helped foster social capital formation, creating dense high-trust networks.

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It was not an education system. Rather, it was an attempt to unleash what I have called the learning system. Instead of interventions aimed at controlling what people learn — which is how we can think about traditional education — folkbildningsrörelsen provided people with the resources they needed to learn on their own. The movements created the conditions for an ecosystem to emerge.

Connie Morgan believes that Dr. Roland Fryer may have cracked the code on how to eliminate the academic gap between races:

White students score about 30 points higher on math tests than black students. Fryer implemented a strategy at a failing Houston school district that closed the gap. He did it by applying to elementary and secondary schools in the Houston district the five tenets of school success that he discovered in researching the habits of highly successful charter schools. Theories on how to close the academic achievement gap vary from “fix the home” to “fix the school” to “fix the community.” Fryer’s results make a compelling case for “fix the school.”

The five tenets are clear-cut:

1. Increased Time in School
2. Good Human Capital Management
3. High Dosage Tutoring
4. Data Driven Instruction
5. Culture of High Expectations

Increasing time children spend in school may be unpalatable for parents concerned about indoctrination but this concern is addressed with the human capital management tenet (more on this in the following paragraph). Others may balk at longer schooldays, citing conflicting research on foreign schools pointing to shorter days as a tenet of student success. However, research on small homogenous countries like Finland is unlikely to reveal practices easily transferable to the United States. Fryer’s experiment confirms, in contrast, that when time in school is spent well, it’s good to spend more of it, particularly when the alternative might be a home environment non-conducive to children’s learning. Fryer had treatment schools in the Houston district increase time on task in various ways, including eliminating breaks between classes, expanding the school day by one hour, offering weekend classes, and adding days to the school year.

Human capital management is probably the most obvious tenet of improving education. In other words, get rid of teachers who won’t embrace the mission and hire ones that will. This tenet is likely the most difficult to execute. Politics and scarcity of resources are the challenges. A whopping 19 out of 20 principals were replaced in the Houston experiment. It took over 300 interviews to find 19 principals to replace them. Of the teachers, 46% were replaced. The district spent more than $5 million buying out teacher contracts. Additionally, feedback to teachers was constant. In the treatment schools, teachers received ten times more observations and feedback than those in the control group. Principals regularly lead staff development and training sessions.

Few schools tutor the number of students for the length of time that Fryer recommends. Remember that extra hour added to the school day? This is where it’s put to work; daily, focused small-group tutoring. In the Houston experiment, low performing fourth graders and all sixth and ninth graders were intensively tutored.

Like their teachers, students in the experiment were constantly being evaluated. Many schools collect data, but few are good at adjusting instruction in light of data. In Fryer’s experiment, treated schools held assessments every three weeks as well as benchmark exams three times in a school year. These results informed tutoring and allowed teachers to set highly specific performance goals with students.

A culture of high expectations is the trickiest tenet to measure. The tenet goes beyond posters that say “Nobody Cares, Work Harder.” Indicators that a real attitude shift has occurred may include things like professional dress codes for teachers, posted achievement goals and/or contracts between parents and schools agreeing to honor expectations.

Math achievement rose significantly in the schools that implemented Fryer’s tenets. Assessment scores increased by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations in a year. In layman’s terms, under this program, there is potential to close the math achievement gap between black and white students in less than three years. Even more important than comparison between groups and closed gaps is the absolute good of increased math proficiency among students who have been too long neglected.

The original paper notes that “injecting best practices from charter schools into traditional Houston public schools significantly increases student math achievement in treated elementary and secondary schools — by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations a year — and has little effect on reading achievement.”

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling, who expects any gains to fade out.)

Henrik Karlsson helped Erik Hoel comb through the literature on the upbringings of historical geniuses:

But what has struck me, more than anything else, is the insane quality of the cultures they internalized. The pedagogies their guardians employed differed radically; they had differing temperaments; they mastered different disciplines, but they all had this in common: they spent their days around highly competent people.

Most who grew up to become geniuses, pre-1900, were kept apart from same age peers and raised at home, by tutors or parents. Michel Montaigne’s father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, curating a classical culture, so Montaigne would learn Latin as his mother tongue. J.S. Mill spent his childhood at his father’s desk, helping his father write a treatise on economics, running over to Jeremy Bentham’s house to borrow books and discuss ideas.

Blaise Pascal, too, was homeschooled by his father. His father choose not to teach him math. (The father, Etienne, had a passion for mathematics that he felt was slightly unhealthy. He feared mathematics would distract Pascal from less intrinsically rewarding pursuits, such as literature, much like modern parents fear TikTok.) Pascal had to teach himself. When it was discovered that Pascal, then a young teenager, had rederived several of Euclid’s proofs, the family relocated to Paris so father and son could participate in the mathematical salons of Mersenne. The instinct was to curate a culture, not to teach, not primarily.

Chimpanzees, who are born into the habitat their genes expect, get by largely on instinct:

We cannot. We have to rely on what anthropologists call cultural learning.

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If you measure two-and-a-half-year-old children against [same-aged] chimpanzees and orangutans, they are about even in their capacity to handle tools and solve problems on their own. Only when it comes to observing others and repeating their actions is there a noticeable difference.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds can extract knowledge from people just by watching them move about a room. They start to desire what those around them desire. They pick up tacit knowledge. They change their dialect to match their peer groups. And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies — these tiny, soft-skulled creatures — can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat.

This ability is not something you can turn on and off. You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside — curate a culture.