The Oxford University college tutorial system, rooted in medieval Oxford and Cambridge, is central to our educational philosophy at Christian Halls International. Inspired by his own Oxford experience, our President, Dr. Nicholas Ellis, aimed to bring the tutorial model’s intimate discussions to communities worldwide. What are the benefits of this system, and is it replicable in the American experience? Dr. Ellis explains this in what follows.

“In the context of the modern American university, applicants to the Christian Hall program frequently ask why a student would choose to study at a Christian Hall, with its system of local Tutors, Fellows, and a small cohort of students, rather than move to a mainstream university or seminary campus, or enroll in one of the many online programs available.

The benefits of the small-scale tutorial model are numerous. We could, for example, enumerate the opportunity for intimate Christian discipleship, long-term multi-generational friendship, the opportunity for integration into local community life, or the possibilities of designing learning outcomes specific to the needs of the region, language, and culture.

In this short post, however, I would refer the reader to the increasingly visible fact that near-universal access to higher education on the one hand, and the general availability of comprehensive data on the other, have not enabled the kind of virtuous formation we desire to see for our next generations. Rather, we see a general degrading of both the intellect and the formation of the soul. Why, then, do we continue to commit ourselves to an educational model that has failed in creating either virtuous people or a virtuous society?

Writer Freddie deBoer points out that most of the modern “socially desirable” metrics coveted by parents and peers have essentially no impact on educational outcomes:

“. . . winning a lottery to attend a supposedly better school in Chicago makes no difference on educational outcomes. In New York? Makes no difference…. Parents in many cities are obsessive about getting their kids into competitive exam high schools, but when you adjust for differences in ability, attending them makes no difference. 

When looking for the single factor that has the most significant impact on academic outcomes, Erik Hoel (in his follow up article) comes to the troubling conclusion that “there exists an agreed-upon and specific answer to the single best way to educate children, a way that has clear, obvious, and strong effects.” “It’s an answer that was well-known historically and is also observed by education researchers today”: private, small-group tutoring. To Mr. Hoel, this conclusion is troubling, as he assumes that “ this answer is unacceptable; the superior method of education is deeply unfair and privileges those at the very top of the socioeconomic ladder”. Nonetheless, from the perspective of academic outcomes, the results were stunning: 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.” Two standard deviations is the difference between a C and an A on a grading scale.

While Mr. Hoel complains that this method was essentially “aristocratic” and “unfair”, he notes some key elements of the tutorial-based education:

• It usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field.

• It involved spending significant time with the student, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields.

• It’s a tradition that goes back as far as one can find: Mr. Hoel lists such stand-outs as Alexander the Great, Markus Aurelius, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf, all of who benefited from this “aristocratic” tutorial method.

In contrast, Mr. Hoel notes that the education system of the United States is one in which students are “thrown into a competitive academic meritocracy wrapped in an obtuse hierarchical bureaucracy, a structure in which they will spend most of their young adult life, forced to learn mostly from their peers, who know as little as they do. Those who can’t sit through it are given drugs until they can. If they happen to test well or their parents spend the money, they might end up in slightly smaller classes, with slightly better teachers, and with slightly smarter peers, but the structure will be the same. The first real intellectuals that most children meet in person are their college professors—already at eighteen and stuck in a class with dozens of other people (even at Harvard, introductory courses are often in the hundreds). Is it any surprise that such methods don’t reliably produce geniuses? . . . We sequestered children from great minds, and, perhaps it’s worth briefly noting, we also sequestered great minds from children.”

Why, then, do we shy away from methods that have historically produced the greatest minds and the greatest social leaders? Certainly, providing access to data is no longer a barrier. Nor does there seem to be a lack of available subject matter experts or professional teachers. No, the greatest barriers seem to be a combination of loyalties and brand affiliations to legacy institutions, a lingering hope that these institutions will somehow form good people (even when the hope that they can be a true alma mater is flickering), and the overwhelming financial and marketing machine that has become modern (especially American) secondary and higher education. The truth, however, is that despite the power of marketing and the allure of branding, formation comes in small packages: personal, human, incarnational. We have access to more instant data than at any time in history; whether we have the will to move from data, to the formation of wisdom in the hearts of our children, will be the question that will govern the future of our next generation.