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Comment by levzettelin | Hacker News Reader

What's problematic about this? Why is this named a "problem"?

The problem is that we are not giving the best education we can to everyone, as it is too costly to have one-to-one tutoring for all. So is there a method that works as well as one-to-one tutoring but affordable by our society?

I believe it’s that Bloom’s study implies that 1-on-1 pacing and teaching produces the best learning results, but that Bloom thought it was infeasible to scale to everyone: it’s “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale”

Beyond that are the equity effects arising where availability of such tutoring primarily to wealthy families means that existing differentials in opportunity and advantage are further multiplied.

There are a few potential options that appear in or occur as one reads the literature (the linked Wikipedia article lists several references, beyond Bloom's own work). That includes inflection points in the effect, that is, some advantage occurs with lower degrees of specificity, particularly with instruction at a 1:10 -- 1:15 instructor/student ratio or so. Another option would be to randomly apportion tutors to the general population, or to assign tutors either to particularly talented students (regardless of family wealth/income), or to specific underprivileged populations (to reduce systemic and historic educational gulfs), or simply at random (which avoids numerous social, political, personal, and/or academic faddish biases).

That personal tutoring leads to better outcomes is not the problem. That will obviously be the case.

The problem is how to bridge the gap in a way more people realize similar benefits.

montessori seems to be the solution here. it is essentially individual tutoring at scale because the teacher/tutor doesn't need to spend 100% of their time with one child. a lot of time the children are practicing on their own, and also they are learning from older students (the tutor doesn't always need to be the most qualified person around, they just need to be able to teach the material that the student is learning). they also don't move on to the next segment until they master the previous one.

This remains to be proved, do you have a source on this?

i am not aware of any studies unfortunately, i just found this though and it looks like a good start:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7 "Montessori education: a review of the evidence base"

but you just need to look at the montessori methodology to see how it works. it may not be as effective as pure one-on-one tutoring but it is certainly way more effective than regular classroom teaching.

keep in mind though that the name montessori is not protected and that there are many schools out there that are montessori in name only without actually having trained teachers.

the lack of good studies of montessori is frustrating to me. the montessori method is as scientific as education can get, free of any ideology or philosophy, unlike eg. waldorf, and therefore should be easy to apply on a wider scale. the teacher training is not expensive (about a year) and could easily be integrated into any general teacher education. the teaching material is more elaborate than just books, especially for the younger age groups, but the high cost now is mainly due to a lack of scale.

it is a core driver of compounding inequity, assuming the rich can afford personal tuition and the poor cannot, which then gives rich kids access to better opportunities to continue being rich. it gives the lie to “equality of opportunity not equality of outcome” because any game of consequence involves outcome being exclusive opportunity.

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