The company you keep
The Gist of Mentors: 1:1 tutoring and socializing with adults can lead to extraordinary results.
See part one of Mentors here.
Part of my How Homeschool? Series
The Mentoring approach to homeschooling prioritizes extensive interaction between children and highly accomplished, knowledgeable, admirable adults, fostering an environment where mature, intellectual, and ethical development is accelerated through emulation and guidance. This model minimizes children's exposure to minors to focus on cultivating maturity by surrounding them with adults who exemplify the virtues and skills the parents value. It operates on the belief that children learn best through direct engagement with expert mentors who can offer deep insights into various fields, encouraging real-world problem solving. The ultimate goal is to prepare children for significant future contributions by exposing them to the best influences during their formative years.
An imagined day for a Mentored early teen: wake up and read the Wall Street Journal and discuss with dad before he leaves for work. Work with a local math grad student tutor for 90 minutes before his classes for the day. Based on previous reading, finalize questions for lunch with mom and a favorite historian. Enjoy a long lunch and write and mail a thank you note on the way home. Set a priority for the historian’s reading recommendations and then read more from tomorrow’s dinner guest, a doctor who had scaled the highest peak on each continent and who had been previously visited a month prior. Have a family dinner to discuss the day’s work, both child and parents’.
But how might other homeschooling approaches critique and comment on Mentors? (Note that this is imaginative speculation, not quotation, from each point of view)
Evidence-based Traditional: Does a genius know what is appropriate for an amateur? 1:1 tutoring is indeed the best educational technique we have evidence for but the evidence points to a very specific, very scripted kind designed for children that is unlike what Mentors advocate - and Mentors seem to have some sort of idea that intelligence, when proximate, can pass along via osmosis. They themselves admit that their conclusions about the childhoods of geniuses are unscientific speculation - and who is to say that with the right modern regime we might not have gotten more geniuses in the past? Tutor your children 1:1, either yourself or through a hired tutor, but closely track and test your children’s performance so you know you’re making progress - and that you’ll meet the expectations of colleges. If desirable, your children can pursue socializing with competent adults as an extracurricular - but that means getting through their assignments first. A child is going to benefit more from a systematic, continuously tested accumulation of a set of knowledge than a series of conversations with smart people.
PhD Dad Art Robinson: Hoping to pick up physics from inviting a famous physicist to lunch is like hoping to pick up the whole plot and significance of the Count of Monte Cristo by inviting a literary scholar who only speaks French to dinner. Understanding advanced science requires advanced numeracy and you can’t just pick that up in the month leading up. Children can be inspired by meetings with the very bright and children can examine the very best works when they’re of interest - but, to actually succeed, children need the confidence and knowledge earned from daily focus and continuously figuring out problems on their own, without help from adults. The Mentor regime is at gigantic risk of turning students into parrots who don’t actually understand what they’re saying.
Figure 1. “Nein, nein, not the energy in your energy drink! Universal energy - think big! - equals mass - no, not the Catholic kind, the general, weighty kind - times the speed of light, sure, the light from the lamp, squared. You know squared, ja? And calculus?”
PhD Dad Bryan Caplan: If you require your kids to advance daily in math, taking reading recommendations from the brilliant can work out very well. The right adult peers can dramatically improve your children’s intellectual game but your kids have to be interested in that sort of thing. It’s easily imaginable how you could drag your kids to lunch with some person who impresses you and not your kids and the whole affair not going well for anyone. Getting letters of recommendation from the right people is certainly a neat way of signaling intelligence and other valuable qualities. But to avoid the negative career effects of nonconformism, you’d want to further signal your children’s intelligence and conscientiousness through mastering standardized tests.
Charlotte Mason: Teaching children to read about the great and behave during their interactions with the great is insufficient - children need to learn great daily habits and realize that genius is no excuse for bad manners. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the most common adjective to accompany “genius” is “evil.” Mentors are so keen on adults that they miss the child - the proper role of a teacher is not to impress children with her own insights but to draw out answers from children in their own words so that they come to understand the material themselves. It’s far too easy in normal conversation to pretend you know something you don’t and move on past your point of understanding. All that being said, Charlotte Mason designed her approach for use by both parents and Victorian governesses, so there’s certainly something to learn from proper delegation - just be sure you know what result you’re aiming for: character.
Figure 2. Having lunch with the winner of the Tour de France also does not necessarily make you a candidate to be the next winner, even with all of the secret chemical techniques. And this indicates the danger of a regime too focused on accomplishment: at what cost was it achieved?
Montessori: Notwithstanding certain prodigies, the very young are just an afterthought for Mentors - and yet, obviously, youth comes first. Children’s focus must be trained on something that will actually fascinate them - Better your child is absolutely fascinated by how to build the Pink Tower than dragged along to a chemistry lecture and told to sit quietly through something they have no understanding of. Through the elementary years, lean into Montessori materials specifically designed to entice children’s attention and that take advantage of the mind-body connection. Later, a pragmatic variant of Mentoring is more aligned, but the goal should always be to help students do things themselves, as opposed to enlisting the help of students for adults. While children’s ability is too often underestimated (but not by Mentors), intentionally isolating them from other children may violate their dignity.
Unschoolers: Informally exposing your children to the world through competent adults is a good idea - but trust children to know what is worthwhile. If you’re determined to teach in this way, make sure the adults have something interesting to say. But also know that children may actually learn best from near peers who can better understand their misunderstandings than adults who long ago mastered the material (this is harder, but not impossible, to achieve with homeschooling - consider the right co-ops and sibling dynamics). Note also that the premier example of Mentoring - John Stuart Mill - had a nervous breakdown in his early twenties! But when a tutor is attempting to get to know each child’s strengths and interests and shaping a curriculum around that - that is Mentoring at its best.
Unit Studies: Getting varied competent adults to intelligently comment on varied subjects may be interesting if they’re willing but your burden must be to make sure that both are varied (i.e. you’d want your pastor, lawyer, doctor and more to each discuss the ocean, ancient Egypt, airplanes, and more.) Looking at each person’s silo from only her angle is no substitute for seeing how all subjects have something to say about everything. Practically, it’s going to be easier to find diverse perspectives if you’re not relying on single individuals to comment on everything - and that may be the biggest danger of Mentoring, that you wind up with a particular genius who is willing to spend time with your family and you adopt his narrow view of the world.
Classical: Most of the smartest people who ever lived are dead and Mentors attempt to lean too much into the living. Admittedly, some of the ancient Western philosophers taught in a way similar to these advocated Mentor conversations and there may be some opportunity for Socratic dialog along these lines - but it has to be guided in a very particular way so that students become familiar with their civilizational inheritance. Cicero and Shakespeare are better company than any modern but all the more so if you’re weighing them against the random banker or District Attorney versus the unlikely opportunity to visit extensively with a Nobel science prize winner. Don’t replace the rigor of Latin conjugation with the challenge of scheduling meals with local celebrities. Embrace the fact that most historical Mentorship was steeped in the Classics and either teach them yourself or find the right person to do so.
Figure 3. Seance homeschooling is not recommended, though the charlatan who could convincingly portray historic geniuses may be a better straight tutor.
Specialists: Historically, most geniuses end up specializing - and that’s great! But, as described above, Mentors risk being too scattered. Yes, you should think about getting the best possible coaches in the world for your child to succeed in one particular field - but trying to continuously arrange conversations with more geniuses from other fields is a distraction. Experts need concentrated, repetitive skill development with continuous feedback on that one thing. Embracing loneliness may actually be their best idea.
Pioneers: The most important feature of a boys-first education is to ensure more adult male role models, and Mentors can achieve that. But it’s extreme to avoid children - boys get a lot out of being with other boys, and yes, you’ll want to curate the right boys (and girls, for that matter). Children benefit from learning how to smoothly interact with other children: at college, you do not want your kid just to hang out with professors, but also know how to lead a club and go out on dates. While Mentors may be right that loneliness is an underappreciated contributor to genius, geniuses were often also alone throughout their lives - many never married. Mentors should think about a more fulsome view of a thriving child than simple intelligence or professional achievement.
Pragmatists: Mentors’ best idea is apprenticeship - otherwise, their ideal of just going around having meals with people they think are smart is likely to accumulate more restaurant bills than actionable knowledge. Furthermore, geniuses are almost famously incapable of taking care of themselves, so even if you go through the complicated charade of continuously arranging these meetings and find the genuine article, you may be learning helplessness. Maybe mentors set up their kids to be a genius, too, but it sounds more like they’re just being set up to host an interview podcast. The problem is everyone wants to start an interview podcast and practically nobody makes money off it. Relatedly, the mushy standard of “admirable” may lend Mentors to pursue today’s “celebrities” who are not worth celebrating.
Bible First: Proverbs tells us that “One who walks with wise people will be wise, But a companion of fools will suffer harm.” And 1 Corinthians warns that “Bad company corrupts good morals.” Curate your mentors to be God-fearing individuals you hope to emulate but also dig deep into the Word to grow ever closer to the ultimate guide. With the right screens, the Mentor program can work.
Cyberschoolers: Mentors offer an admirably first principles rejection of institutional schooling but the best evidence suggests that we’re getting closer and closer to the point where AI can fill the role of these adult mentors, perhaps even outperform them because they’ll be able to instantaneously tap into a much wider field of knowledge. And of course don’t neglect the prospect of going through MIT Open Courseware to learn subjects from the teachers at one of the most selective institutions in the world.
My own takeaway: curating who exactly your children spend time with is one of the best parts of homeschooling and Mentors correctly identify the weirdness of isolating children from society’s most accomplished. But while a Mentor approach to homeschooling can be valuable, it is probably typically insufficient, especially in math, but possibly also in morals, depending on the choice and emphasis of tutors. I also have high self-confidence in my ability to find the right books to match my children’s interests (though I am certainly happy to hear recommendations from good sources.) I also am highly uncertain about the Mentor rejection of testing, whose problems I can see compounding over time. But overall, it’s a provocative take worth considering. Perhaps its biggest problem is that the market for the kind of tutors it desires has dramatically diminished, such that rather than say early American history where every newspaper had lots of advertisements of potential tutors, today you’d have to string together people for whom it is not a full time job or perhaps even a previous consideration. Relatedly, the status of tutors has ranged widely across time and place and, at this exact moment, spending all your time tutoring one family is not exactly something that people brag about (unless, perhaps, you are famous). And, of course, you should know that tutors since the dawn of tutoring have complained that they are not nearly paid well enough!
Further reading might include:
Childhoods of exceptional people by Henrik Karlsson
A primary inspiration for my description of the Mentor homeschooling regime, “Mentor” being my own coinage. An unscientific essay that nevertheless is an excellent reflection on this subject. 2/3 of his sample of geniuses home-educated. “A lot of care went into curating the environment around the children—fascinating guests were invited, libraries were built, machines were brought home and disassembled—but the children were left with a lot of time to freely explore the interests that arose within these milieus.”
Why we stopped making Einsteins by Erik Hoel
Another primary inspiration, this essay answers the title by saying we stopped “aristocratic tutoring.”
“The most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.” Query whether it was accompanied by too much entertainment and not enough boredom!
“Today, tutoring is seen mostly as a corrective to failures within the bureaucratic structures of eduction, like an intervention to help out a course, grade, or test. In general, those doing well in school don’t get tutoring—it’s like we’re applying the secret genius sauce solely to the kids who aren’t going to be geniuses” - and for the narrow goal of improving standardized test scores.
See also his follow up reply to counter-arguments
And another reply concludes: “So what matters, it appears to me, 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.. (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.”
A deep dive into the research on 1:1 tutoring
Centuries of Tutoring by Edward E. Gordon
A historical survey of the practice from ancient times until the 1980s
“Education of children at court [including Elizabeth I] corroborated the fact that there was no separate world of childhood. Their daily schedule began at 6:00 a.m. with divine service and no breakfast. From 7:00 to 11:00 they were tutored in Latin. At 11:00 the children received their first meal of the day that was eaten until noon. The music tutor occupied them from 12:00 to 2:00, followed by the French tutor from 2:00 to 3:00, and the Latin and Greek tutors from 3:00 to 5:00. Evening prayers were then conducted and the children given supper. In whatever time was left over, the boys and girls played until the music tutor arrived at 8:00. After one last hour of instruction the children retired at 9:00. These rules were followed for children until age sixteen. Very young children had shorter lessons and an earlier bedtime, but a similar demanding academic program…. Sir Henry Slingsby [recorded in his diary] his dissatisfaction of the Latin abilities of Thomas, his four-year-old son ‘I find him duller this year than last which would discourage one but that I think the cause to be his too much minding play which takes his mind from his book.’”
“The majority of the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States were educated at some point by private tutors in Latin, Greek, mathematics, science and literature. Many had been raised by distinguished Southern families…Madison was taught to read and write and the beginnings of arithmetic at home by his mother and grandmother. He boarded for a few years (1762-1767) [when he would have been 11 to 16] with a Scottish schoolmaster, Donald Robertson, a well-known tutor. The course included Latin, Greek, arithmetic, geography, algebra, geometry and literature, including Locke. In 1767 a Reverend Thomas Martin, the new pastor at the Madison family parish church, was hired as the family tutor for James, his three brothers and one sister. During 1767-1768 Madison was tutored at home by Martin to prepare him for admission to the College of New Jersey (Princeton).”
The Oxford Tutorial: Thanks, You Taught Me How to Think
A collection of essays defending and reflecting upon the particular British university practice that sadly has not spread very far (due to cost?) but can serve as a sound basis for homeschooling. Note that Memoria College allows you to literally hire Oxford scholars to conduct tutorials for online tutorials.
“In 1960, [the one hour tutorial] takes place one-to-one, in the tutor's study, the student gowned, in jacket and tie. The one thing the perfect student will have known all along is that when read out his essay must last no more than ten minutes, that it must make three (or at most four) points, and that it must make up in clarity for whatever it lacks in depth and sophistication”
“He will not know what he thinks until he see what he has written”
“The tutor is not a teacher in the usual sense: it is not his job to convey information. The student should find for himself the information.”
“Lectures teach you to take notes while the mind tries to wander, and then to recycle the outcome: tutorials oblige you to think”
Richard Dawkins’ contribution is especially notable: “In my penultimate term Peter Brunet, my wise and humane college tutor, managed to secure for me tutorials in Animal Behaviour with the great Niko Tinbergen, later to win the Nobel Prize for his part in founding the science of ethology. Tinbergen himself was solely responsible for all the lectures in Animal Behaviour, so he would have been well-placed to give 'lecture-driven' tutorials. I need hardly say that he did no such thing. Each week my tutorial assignment was to read one D.Phil thesis. My essay was to be a combination of D.Phil examiner's report, proposal for follow-up research, review of the history of the subject in which the thesis fell, and theorand philosophical discussion of the issues that the thesis raised. Never for one moment did it occur to either of us to wonder whether this assignment would be directly useful to me in answering some exam question. We might have thought that it might have been useful to me in whatever career I eventually undertook… Another term my college tutor, recognizing that my bias in biology was more philosophical than his own, arranged for me to have tutorials with Arthur Cain, an effervescently brilliant young star of the department, who went on to become Professor of Zoology at Liverpool. Far from his tutorials being driven by any lectures then being offered for the Honour School of Zoology, Cain had me reading nothing but books on history and philosophy. It was up to me to work out the connections between zoology and the books that I was reading. I tried, and I loved the trying. I'm not saying that my juvenile essays in the philosophy of biology were any good - with hindsight I know that they were not - but I do know that I have never forgotten the exhilaration of writing them… I remember the bare facts about starfish hydraulics [because I had to write an essay about them] but it is not the facts that matter. What matters is the way in which we were encouraged to find them. We didn't just mug up a textbook, we went into the library and looked up books old and new; we followed trails of original research papers until we had made ourselves as near world-authorities on the topic at hand as it is possible to become in one week. The encouragement provided by the weekly tutorial meant that one didn't just read about starfish hydraulics, or whatever the topic was. For that one week I remember that I slept, ate and dreamed starfish hydraulics. Tube feet marched behind my eyelids, hydraulic pedicellariae quested and sea water pulsed through my dozing brain. Writing my essay was the cath-arsis, and the tutorial was the justification for the entire week. And then the next week there would be a new topic and a new feast of images to be conjured in the library. We were being educated and our education was tutorial-driven.”