Surprisingly, there exists an agreed-upon best way to educate children. The problem is that this best way is unacceptable. That’s because it is profoundly unfair, privileging those at the very top of the socioeconomic ladder.
This superior method of education was well-known historically, and its effects are still seen in education research today: one-on-one tutoring.
Tutoring dramatically improves a student’s abilities and scores. This improvement is sometimes called “Bloom’s 2 sigma problem,” because in the 1980s the education researcher Benjamin Bloom found that tutored students “performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods.” In other words, “the average tutored student was above 98 percent of the students in the control class.”
Despite its effectiveness, tutoring is nowadays usually reserved for specific tests; the Advanced Placement tests, the SATs, and the GREs form the lucrative trinity of private tutoring. Outside of these, tutoring is mostly used as a corrective to learning gaps or losses—not the main method of actual education.
But if we go back in time, tutoring often did act as the main method of education—at least for the elite.
