The piece is about the kind of education the children of the aristocracy received and how it has disappeared entirely.
The more specialized we get the less likely everyone will learn about it in general education and thus the inventor/genius will be less renowned. That doesn't make it less of a breakthrough or less genius. The article doesn't address this at all.
Further, there are many counter examples of genius that wasn't privately/aristocraticly tutored like Richard Feynman. For his point to stand there must be more privately tutored geniuses than non-privately tutored geniuses and today less intensive private tutoring. He doesn't have data for either of these prerequisites.
I found the whole article and reasoning quite lacking right from the premise.
But yeah, my main response to the article is that "genius" and "the Western classics" are more social constructions than any sort of objectively defined term.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_J...
Like, most of modern chipmaking is just glorified analog photography, who knows what sort of microprocessors we could make through wildly different processes.
Note also that some of the people were "tutored" by their parents; homeschooling today could fill the same role.
And,
> So, where are all the Einsteins?
> The answer must lie in education somewhere.
That's a really glib dismissal of all other possible reasons, with almost no factual reason (or even argument) behind it.
(I can't think of any tech titans whose kids do receive exclusively tutoring either, instead of being sent to the local Palo Alto schools or private schools or something relatively middle-class.)
Third, there's the "Where's Todays Beethoven" chart, "Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields)."
Note: "with the education and access to contribute to these fields". If you increase the denominator by many orders of magnitude, no matter what the numerator is the result will probably go down.
"Tutoring, one-on-one instruction, dramatically improves student’s abilities and scores. In education research this effect is sometimes called “Bloom’s 2-sigma problem” because in the 1980s the researcher Benjamin Bloom found that tutored students '. . performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods—that is, "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class.”'"
The 2-sigma problem points to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem which has,
"Bloom found that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods—that is, "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"."
The "mastery learning" method "is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy, first formally proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning), so there's that. (I'm a cynic; "my way produces much better results" with no further data tends to inspire distrust.)
"Consider the easy nature by which Darwin, at the age of only 16 and already in university,..."
And what proportion of university students were younger than 17 in the 1820s?
"Indeed, it’s remarkable how common aristocratic tutors were. Essentially universal."
One might suspect that where and when there is no more modern educational system that tutors would, in fact, be the only way to get any education.
One further note: the US pays roughly $15,000 per student per year as it is. Are you willing to work a full-time job for less than $30,000 per year? How's your Greek and Latin? Math? Science? Literature? (Assumptions: 2 half-time students per tutor. Some overhead will be necessary for the tutors.)
The absolute population has more than quadrupled since 1901. If I understand the data being used here, the "effective population" has increased over 100 fold in that time period. Yet the number of people receiving Nobel Prizes in any given field each year hasn't appreciably increased. And we would likely perceive the Nobel as less prestigious if they awarded 4 times as many a year -- certainly if they awarded 100 times as many. The same can be said of awards in art, music, and other fields.
Awards are obviously not the only way of measuring prestige. But the same could be said of coverage in prestigious journals, or by renowned critics. Nobody would reasonably expect there to be 100 times as many top-tier literary journals in 2021 as in 1901. It almost seems like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it?
I think a limiting factor here is that acclaim is a matter of mass agreement. A single person can only watch so many films, listen to so many songs, read about so many scientific accomplishments in a day. A film critic in 2021 is probably not watching that many more movies a week than their counterpart in 1960. And it's not like movies are load-balanced between critics.