Tutoring: The Human Superpower

In this episode, I interview Bella Issakova who has been a violin tutor for the last 30 years and has had a relationship with tutoring going back to when she was 4 and a half learning music in Bulgaria. She has a rich and deep relationship with tutoring in general and violin lessons specifically. I interviewed her because I've learned a great deal about tutoring itself from watching the intentional way she approaches it. And, as will become clear, violin tutoring is about way more than the violin.

Why is the rise and the decline of the USA so much like the rise and the decline of the Dutch Republic in the 1600s? The 1900s will probably always be remembered by historians as the American Century. But the 1600s was the Dutch Century. Both of these nations had their exceptional rises, their amazing zeniths, and then their declines. But historians have noticed that the details and particulars of both the rise and the decline phases are eerily similar. The symptoms of decline that we're experiencing right now--rising inequality, stagnant wages, polarization, elite infighting--are only "new" to us if we don't study history. But if we do study the trends, maybe learn more about the cycle we're stuck in. This episode is about the rise of the sunnier more optimistic rising periods of both the Dutch and the American Century. The next episode will be about the darker phase: the decline.

Watch on Youtube for those who prefer visual aids to go with the audio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2iR9d8XVuE How can the same country that gave us the Renaissance also give us Fascism? Naturally, there are more than one explanation. Yet, if we look through the education lens, we can’t help but notice that Italy gave us the Renaissance when its north was the most educated region in all of Western Europe... BUT it gave us Fascism after centuries of educational stagnation made it into Europe’s worst education laggard. Is this just a coincidence? If not, it could have dire implications for our future as we continue to adhere to the 20th education system for the entire 21st century.

Check out the YouTube video here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlTBjsYuZWI In this series, we're taking a big step back in order to look at education as a force in the big picture of humanity. We're investigating the stories of the civilizations that have spent time in the last 1,000 years as the most educated civilization on the planet--China, Italy, Netherlands, Great Britain, and the USA. They were the ones who pushed the education needle forward. 1,000 years ago, the most literate civilization on planet Earth was China. But the Chinese educated class then deliberately stagnated its education system for a very long time. Understanding China's ups and downs... and ups can help to shed some light on the powerful forces of educational expansion and educational stagnation in completely different times and places. This first episode can shed light on what's at stake when we consider how aggressive to be about our own educational progress.

This episode is also on youtube. You can view that video at this link: https://youtu.be/B8B7pdyLWvk Since 1980, have Americans been getting more educated, less educated, or just holding steady? How would you even answer that question? Literacy and math test scores? Trends in our rising or falling IQ scores? The number of years average Americans are spending in school. Changes in our number of high school and college graduates? Actually, in this episode, we’re going to look at all of that at more. Educational progress in the USA–or lack thereof–matters a lot to the theme of this mini-series of episodes, in which we’re looking at all the nations that, like the USA, became the most educated civilization in the world at some point in the last 1,000 years. We need to look at the science. Did Americans really stop getting smarter?

It seems like we're in unprecedented times. And yet, if we stand back and look at the bigger picture, our historical moment is not nearly as unique as we think it is. The USA and much of the western world is stuck in a recurring pattern. And this pattern has everything to do with our shared blindness to the power of sharing education ever more widely within the society. This episode introduces a mini-series of episodes on the recurring nature of this pattern. In it we'll cover some of the other countries we share this pattern with. We're going to look deeply into the educational histories of China, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and then we'll return to the USA again.

In 2010, Kathleen Jones and I, Giles Leeper, cofounded a charter school in Atlanta called The Kindezi School. By having just six students per class and splitting them into smaller groups, this school attempted to make tutoring a bedrock of its path to success, while only using the funding levels available to public schools. Kathleen became a teacher and I became its principal. So we had two different experiences of the school we started. Did we accomplish something meaningfully different? Did we do something that could be considered a paradigm shift or “unleashing our superpower”? How much did Kathleen’s experience of tutoring at The Kindezi School align with what we’ve learned about the science and psychology of tutoring? Is it possible for you or any individual to do something truly transcendent by starting a charter school? These are some of the questions we reflect on in this episode.

The teen suicide rate rose by 57% in the decade before the COVID19 pandemic. The US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, thinks "the defining health crisis of our time" is not COVID: it's the mental health crisis, especially the youth mental health crisis. In 2020, he published a book called, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. It's about this crisis and how connecting with one another through conversation and quality time together is our path of healing what in many ways a loneliness epidemic. Although he is not a guest today, I was surprisingly reminded of his work two Fridays ago as I woke up to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in the devastated city of Asheville, North Carolina. This episode is about how the way we are using our superpower...and not using it... is helping to create the youth mental health crisis and the role that our superpower could play in recovering from it. https://www.amazon.com/Together-Connection-Performance-Greater-Happiness/dp/0062913298

Conversations with children have a great deal of power. In fact, even simple conversations are an important dimension of our human superpower. The science is unambiguous. Children who have a lot of quality conversations during their childhoods tend to have important advantages over children who do not. These advantages range from language and communication skills to a secure sense of belonging and confidence. But not all conversations are equal… In this episode, we’ll speak with Harvard Professor, Dr. Rebecca Rolland, about her book The Art of Talking with Children: The Simple Keys to Nurturing Kindness, Creativity, and Confidence in Kids. Her book offers practical, research-based advice about how people who converse with children can maximize the incredible potential of the simple conversation. It’s also vital advice for those of us who want to one day unleash our superpower for the sake of all our children.   Here are links to where you can buy Dr. Rebecca Rolland’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Talking-Children-Creativity-Confidence/dp/0062938886   https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-art-of-talking-with-children-rebecca-rolland?variant=39367981727778  

Did you know there was a grassroots, bottom up education revolution in West Virginia? There really was. How did it happen? What did it change? And what were the consequences of it for average West Virginians? These are some of the questions that we’ll be exploring in this episode with the help of Giles Leeper’s great grandfather, Lorimer Cavins, who was there when it happened. He researched educational change extensively in the early 1920s and produced a document in 1925 called, “The Financing of Education in West Virginia.” Educational progress was a very important part of our past. We can study how it happened in order to make it an important part of our future as well. Link to the Google Book, The Financing of of Education in West Virginia: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Financing_of_Education_in_West_Virgi/ed6gAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

A lot of skillful parenting and teaching depends on our ability to see the world through a child's eyes. In this episode, we'll speak with Dr. Ian Apperly, author of the book, Mindreaders: The Cognitive Basis of "Theory of Mind", about what mind reading is, why it's important, and ask to what extent we're really able to use this skill in public education today.

To unleash our superpower would most likely require millions more educators than we have. So where will they come from? In this episode, we’ll explore how to find millions of tutors who are even better educated and better equipped for teaching than our average teacher is right now. 

A lot of people agree that tutoring is how most children learn best. But they see it as too expensive to consider making available at the mass scale. Despite years of searching, I've never found a financial analysis explaining what it would cost. Having run a school system for ten years in which I was always directly involved in educational finances, I feel qualified to perform this analysis. And I have. In this episode, let's dive into what it would really cost to make tutoring into something public and communal instead of just a private tool--for mostly families with resources. 

Tutoring was not invented; it evolved. It evolved for a purpose. Even though it has never been free, in some circumstances, it has been worth the cost since the dawn of humanity. That purpose and that cost are still very relevant topics in modern Western societies. Join me and Professor Sheina Lew-Levy of Durham University, UK as we probe the prehistoric origins of costly education itself. Dr. Lew-Levy is an anthropologist and psychologist who studies educational practices of forager (or hunter-gatherer) people in order to search for clues about the role teaching and learning played in our shared evolutionary origins. 

A father and son share a story about a seemingly harmless decision that set the son on a disastrous path in their local public school and what they did about it. With guests, Jeremy and Isaiah Lewis, we’ll explore some of the real-life implications of relying on a delicate system that cannot systematically meet individual kids where they’re at.

Why do parents have such a big impact on which kids succeed in school and beyond?  One of the answers has to do with a simple but poorly understood concept called “parental scaffolding”. Developmental psychology professor, Stuart Hammond, joins us today to help explain research showing how parents impact their child’s brain development with decisions that often do not seem as important as they are.    Here's a

Why do so many smart people find it hard to learn in classrooms? Why can’t an education system that was good enough for our grandparents be good enough for us? The first episode addresses some of the major themes and mysteries of modern education, while telling the story of Timmy Matthews–a person who, like so many of us, could learn well from tutoring but found classroom teaching to be disastrously ineffective.

For the last three centuries, American communities have been amongst the most educationally radical in the world. The colonial education movement in the 18th century, the common schools movement in the 19th, and the high school movement in the 20th each made a quality education more accessible to everyone. The impact of these education movements contributed to many advances, most of which we now take for granted. But the world didn't stop changing and complexifying. In the 21st century, our communities must again do something big for the education of our children, or continue to see a darkening future for generations to come. But there is hope. There is something as grand as what came before that we have yet to try. For the last 50 years, evidence has been piling up that humans don't actually learn or teach very well in traditional classrooms. We are far better at tutoring. With this podcast, Tutoring: The Human Superpower,  educator and researcher Giles Leeper explores with guests the origins, uses, opportunities, and barriers of our shared hidden superpower. Together, we explore the question, what it would mean to finally unleash this uniquely human superpower?