The Case for Aristocratic Tutoring: Eliminating Waste

Most of us remember being bored in elementary school. You understood the material within the first ten minutes, but had to sit through another forty minutes of the teacher explaining the same concept to the rest of the class. Or perhaps you had the opposite experience, where you didn’t understand something, but the teacher moved on because the rest of the class was ready.

This is a fundamental inefficiency in classroom education. We group twenty or thirty children together, largely by age, and expect them to learn the same material at approximately the same pace. Children have vastly different learning trajectories, and forcing them into a synchronized curriculum inevitably creates enormous amounts of wasted learning time. Time and time again, we find that inefficiencies, not spending, teacher quality, or curriculum, are the gating factors. OECD’s PISA 2022 analysis found that higher spending was not significantly associated with better math performance.

There are two kinds of waste worth considering.

The first is behavioral disruption. In a recent New York Times article, Nikole Hannah-Jones described how her daughter’s teachers spent so much time managing disruptive students that they often couldn’t finish lessons or help other students. Years later, her daughter discovered significant gaps in foundational mathematics. There is empirical evidence that these disruptions have meaningful costs. A 2018 economics paper estimated that exposure to an additional disruptive peer in an elementary classroom of 25 students reduced classmates’ earnings in their twenties by approximately 3%. A 2009 study found that having classmates with serious emotional problems was associated with lower first-grade mathematics scores.

The second kind of disruption is much more pervasive and sadly, normalized: having to wait for everyone else. A child who has already mastered a concept must wait for classmates to catch up. A child who hasn’t mastered the prerequisites must move on before she’s ready. Both lose valuable opportunities for productive learning, and worse, these wastes compound over time. A student who consistently learns faster than her classmates could lose years of potential progress over the course of her education, without ever performing poorly on a standardized test.

Erik Hoel’s essay on aristocratic tutoring makes an interesting observation: historically, many exceptional intellectuals, including John von Neumann and Bertrand Russell, received substantial individualized instruction. Their tutors could introduce advanced concepts as soon as the child was ready. While these historical examples are heavily confounded by family background and selection, the underlying mechanism makes sense from first principles.

At Presto, we believe children should progress through foundational skills based on demonstrated competence. We track concrete observations of each child’s abilities and use them to recommend what the child may be ready to learn next. Children who have mastered a skill can move on, while those who need more practice can spend additional time building the necessary foundations.

The synchronization of academic learning is an unnecessary constraint. We should be maximizing productive learning time, where children are consistently engaging with material at the appropriate level of difficulty and acquiring new skills.