If tutors really do reliably produce two-sigma learning gains, then why aren't most top achievers the product of tutors? Yes, they're expensive, but perhaps "only" 2-3x private school; there are a lot of wealthy parents. Diminishing returns for high achievers?
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Interestingly, most (all?) top achievers in athletics and conservatory music are tutored. Why is this not true of most fields? Is it that music/athletics have so much more tacit knowledge? Or by contrast is so much more legible, so that a tutor/coach can be much more effective?
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If anything it’d seem LESS legible so the tutor has outsized impact compared to topics that can effectively be learned via books/content by highly motivated learners
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Right, definitely. I meant legibility in the sense that Ericsson describes: easy to assess; clear standards of achievement; tight feedback loops available; focused practice techniques available; etc
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I wonder if there’s any selection bias in that as well.
E.g. if you reach an extraordinarily high level in sports opportunities like private coaches open up or begin to make sense financially.
And a lot of music is 1:1 even at relatively low levels.
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“conservatory music” means performance? performance seems like a fundamentally different thing from creativity; wouldn’t make sense to me to compare this to e.g. science. but composing music would make sense as a comparison. are top composers tutored? probably not?
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Right. And athletes are all playing the same game with the same rules.
In science and creative work, the rules and methods are constantly changing.
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This applies for Film/Theatre Acting as well.
Maybe because there isn't a finish line in mastery?
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The activities are inherently more collaborative for now and have had generations to develop what those tutoring expectations look like. Dewey's comments on the individualist approach to ed and "school crimes" in School and Society is a good place to start.
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We don't have the language ready for more collaborative ed environments. In sports, language exists to describe both "points" and "assists". In schools, "grades" line up with points, but there's no "assist" corollary that means much in administration tasks.
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for athletics and music, the goal is to do the thing
both the student and the tutor are focused on improving the underlying skill
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for academics, the goal is to get a good grade in the class
both the student and the tutor are focused on getting temporary proficiency in the narrow subset of knowledge that will be on the test
neither is interested in improving the underlying skill
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