Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring

If kids are reading this, depending on who you are, college is probably still worthwhile right now, but 5 years from now, I expect things will be quite different. Peter Thiel has run a really interesting experiment with his Thiel Fellows program whose graduates (including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin) have done far better than university propon... See more

Aristocratic tutoring was not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subj... See more

We have a public imagination that cannot conceive of what exactly to do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless, and so they shuffle through a decade of busywork. Partly, the length of schooling has increased simply because it could—because we no longer

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