Tutoring: The Human Superpower

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 recur...

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 st...

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...

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 conversati...

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 ear...

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...

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 psyc...

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 link to the article w...

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...