Giles Leeper

Tutoring: The Human Superpower

Episodes

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Episodes

A lot of skillful parenting and teaching depends on our ability to see the world through a child's ​eyes. In this episode, we'll speak with Dr. Ian Apperly, author of the book, Mindreaders: The ​Cognitive Basis of "Theory of Mind", about what mind reading is, why it's important, and ask to ​what extent we're really able to use this skill in public education today.

To unleash our superpower would most likely require millions of more educators than we have. So ​where will they come from? In this episode, we’ll explore how to find millions of tutors who are ​even better educated and better equipped for teaching than our average teacher is right now.

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 into what it would really cost to make tutoring into ​something public and communal instead of just a private tool--for mostly families with resources.


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 psychologist who studies educational practices of forager (or ​hunter-gatherer) people in order to search for clues about the role teaching and learning played in ​our shared evolutionary origins.


A father and son share a story about a seemingly harmless decision that set the son ​on a disastrous path in school and what they did about it. With guests, Isaiah and ​Jeremy Lewis, we’ll explore some of the implications of relying on a system that ​cannot meet individual kids where they’re at.


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. Read more here.

Book on the Railroad Tracks, Black and White

Why do so many smart people find it hard to learn in classrooms? Why can't an ​education

system that was good enough for our grandparents be good enough for us? The first ​episode addresses some of the major themes and mysteries of modern education, ​while telling the story of Timmy Matthews-a person who, like so many of us, could ​learn well from tutoring but found classroom teaching to be disastrously ineffective.

Giles Leeper

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"Humans evolved to tutor and be tutored by humans. Until any child can be tutored up to full time, we aren’t trying our hardest."

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Superpower, Inc.

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Atlanta, GA

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