What medieval people got right about learning (2019)
116 comments
·August 14, 2025wrp
throw10920
Practice is extremely important, and I don't think its importance is exaggerated at all.
I would expect students in an environment with a typically high student-to-teacher ratio, but who actually practice what they're being taught, will significantly outperform students who are taught one-on-one by a personal tutor but rarely actually perform the thing that they're trying to learn.
Obviously, "¿Por Qué No Los Dos?" - doing both is even better. But tutoring isn't obviously superior to practice.
As a personal anecdote (not to replace the above general arguments), I've gotten several hundred hours of one-on-one tutoring in an advanced field of physics from a number of experts, and yet I learned significantly less than I have from significantly fewer hours studying a separate (but no less difficult) field of math when I actually worked the problems.
jonahx
> But tutoring isn't obviously superior to practice.
Good tutoring will essentially be practice and worked problems with instant feedback -- not an individual "lecture".
While there is value to being in the forest entirely alone, I think for a motivated student good tutoring will outperform working problems on your own in speed of overall learning. Both are good though, and I agree working the problems out, and working a lot of problems, is the main thing.
throw10920
> Good tutoring will essentially be practice and worked problems with instant feedback
Yes, but then we're conflating the two things we're trying to separate - one-on-one instruction, and worked practice.
I was using "tutoring" to mean specifically one-on-ones. I completely agree that a good tutor will have you practice what you're learning, and that's definitely much closer to optimal than the educational mess we're currently in.
seer
Practicing and getting constant feedback is so important (and sadly underrated in school). It still strange to me how we empathise rote learning in school and have the experimentation away from experts (homework).
For example in orbital mechanics it was experimentation that got me to actually understand all the retrograde burns, plane changes and Hohmann transfers, almost exactly like the xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/1356/ (though without the job at NASA part of course)
andsoitis
> getting constant feedback
Concur. However, how many teachers and students are willing to engage in candid critique of the student’s work?
atoav
As a university level educator that also has assistants that learn through practise I must say I find the question: "Is tutoring better than practise?" useless. Better at what? In which field?Thst surely highly depends at what the goal, the subject, the individual students character, the available time and teaching resources are.
That means the question is so context-dependent that any potential answer would only bring insight with that specific context in mind.
That being said, I am a huge fan of practise paired with theory (this is what a good tutor would do). Many people only start to care about theory once they have encountered the problems theory helps with have been encountered in the wild. And getting people to care is one of the first things any educator has to achieve.
There are many who start with the base assumption that theory is worthless, but I'd argue having accurate mental models will greatly improve the speed and quality of the work. Additionally this helps to learn faster, as the question why aomething went wrong in practise can be answered faster and more accurately.
throw10920
> I find the question: "Is tutoring better than practise?" useless.
Yes, on further reflection, you're right. My statement was spurred by the claim that practice had "exaggerated significance" in the article relative to practice, which is kind of a hard thing to quantify and argue about.
And I definitely wasn't trying to say that theory isn't important! I love theory - I don't actually like working the problems - and think that it's important, it's just that I've realized that lots of theory is much less effective without practice, even in a highly abstract field like math.
The interplay between abstract (abstract explanation; theory) and concrete (concrete examples in the course of explanation; practice) is fascinating to me.
Based on your experience, do you have any insight for whether, in the course of verbal/written instruction, it's better to start with concrete instances of a concept, and then give the abstract concept itself, or vice versa?
ruslan_sure
I agree. It's a constant dance between theory and practice.
somenameforme
This is extremely interesting, because while I'd never heard of the '2 sigma problem' [1] before, one university class I had seems to have been largely modeled on it, but with a very different angle. It was a 'self paced' electrical engineering course where we were given a textbook and free to advance through it at our own pace - kind of farcically, since you needed to complete at least 2 chapters per week to finish by the end of the semester.
Moving forward to the next chapter required, exactly as described in that paper, the completion of a problem set and then a score of at least 90% on a test demonstrating mastery of the previous chapter, sometimes accompanied by also demonstrating that skill in a lab. But far from 1 on 1, this entire class was effectively 0 on infinity. The teaching assistant/proctors that we engaged with were there only to grade your work and provided minimal feedback.
And indeed it was one of the most educational 'classes' I ever took. But I think this challenges the concept that it has anything to do with 1 on 1 attention. But rather the outcome seems practically tautological - a good way to get people to perform to the point of mastery is to require that they perform to the point of mastery. Of course, at scale, all you're really doing is weeding out the people that are unable to achieve mastery. And indeed that class was considered a weed out course.
justanotherjoe
A couple things come to mind reading this. Maybe your professor knew the material was engaging in itself or the textbook was exceptionally well written that any added structure on top was likely to complicate it. The second possibility was that maybe they knew it was a fundamental course that students must engage with anyway.
Regarding the lack of feedback, maybe grade was sufficient. Sometimes enough is best.
I feel like whats most important in teaching is that the teacher has integrity. If you can control the teacher in any way, that loses the dynamic. In fact, his idiosyncratic method might indirectly increased his integrity score, which we subconsciously evaluate on teachers before we allow ourselves to engage.
aaplok
Mastery Learning, which Bloom advocates for in the two sigma problem paper, is an alternative to 1 on 1, not a way to achieve it.
What you describe seems to be a very poor implementation of mastery learning. But if the tutor is completely disengaged even 1 on 1 tutoring is unlikely to have good effects.
dcassett
I had such a self-paced course in the '70s based on the book "Fundamentals of Logic Design" by Charles Roth, Jr. It should be noted that the book was specifically written for self-paced study, and as such acted as a sort of tutor by carefully laying out a sequence of reading short segments, answering short questions about the material, then doing more involved problems. I found this course to be very effective and motivating for me, especially given the undergraduate class sizes.
somenameforme
Wow, care to share your alma mater? That was the exact book we also used - some decades later, 5th edition for my class! Absolutely wonderful book. Wow, what a wave of emotions I got when looking at that book's cover again!
And yeah that course and book gave me a serious love of electrical engineering to the point I even considered swapping majors (it was part of the CS curriculum for us), and in hind sight I rather wish I did, but hey - wisdom to pass onto the kids.
PunchTornado
maybe with AI and things like guided learning from gemini we all can get a 1-1 instructor.
musicale
As I understand it, the (medieval?) tutorial system is still used at some universities, notably Oxford and Cambridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system
Much of graduate education in the US seems similar.
efitz
1:1 classroom instruction removes a number of teachers from the labor pool equal to the number of students. Apprenticeships remove only a small fraction of that from the labor pool (because the practitioner spends only part of their time teaching/supervising the apprentice and then makes the apprentice go practice the skill) and partially makes up the lost labor with the labor from the apprentices- apprentices are expected to do actual productive work, not just learn.
graemep
> 1:1 classroom instruction removes a number of teachers from the labor pool equal to the number of students.
It does require more teachers, but not 1:1. Students being taught 1:1 learn a lot faster, and can be set work to do unsupervised. From my experience I think less than an hour a seek (sometimes a lot less) of tuition time (plus a bit more for marking, and another few hours of study by the student) is sufficient to cover a subject 1:1 (and it can often me a lot less) for teenagers (specifically for GCSEs - British exams sat in schools at 16).
it does require a significantly higher ratio than classroom teaching usually does, but its a long way from needing 1:1.
impossiblefork
It doesn't have to be a crisis time-wise.
In music you usually have a small amount of one-on-one instruction and then you practice. In tennis you usually have a small number of one-one-lessons and then you practice and play matches.
You could probably do the same for maths. You're given some problems to try to solve and given two hours, then once you've made a serious attempt you get individual tutoring for an hour, then you go back to solving problems and there's a short one-on-one question session at the end, let's say 30 minutes. Then you have a 5 hour study session with 1.5 hours of teacher time, so he can have around three students.
m463
I think another nuance is
apprenticeship is learning by/while doing
the classroom is learning by simulated doing
RataNova
Yeah, while the article makes good arguments about learning by doing and context-rich environments, it probably understates how much of the effectiveness comes down to just personalized guidance
danielbln
If it wasn't for all the pitfalls and hallucinations (and even then there is probably something to be had already) LLMs would be perfect for this. Limitless customizable one-on-one tutoring. I would have killed for something like it when I was in school, instead the choices were expensive tutor (not an option) or else good luck, hope you pay attention in the back of the 30 student classroom.
CGMthrowaway
Interestingly the Bloom study (1984) that describes the "two sigma problem" looked at three types of learning.
a) Group Instruction: Baseline
b) Mastery Learning, ensuring students master the material before moving on: One sigma improvement (outperform 68% of students in group setting)
c) 1 on 1 Tutoring: Two sigma improvement (outperform 98% of students in group setting)
Mawr
Irrelevant. The actual key here is training the exact skills you need to do the job. No classroom instruction can ever replicate that.
The best way to learn how to do something is to do it. There's no substitute.
adamgordonbell
You seem to be suggesting he's writing from a place of not knowing about the benefits of one-on-one learning and the "two sigma problem" when this is something he frequently writes about.
WalterBright
I learned in college that I didn't learn anything until I worked the problem sets.
(It always seemed like I learned it, but when faced with the problem sets I discovered I hadn't learned anything yet.)
It's the same with everything. You can watch a yootoob video on rebuilding a carburetor all day, but you don't know nuttin until you take it apart yourself.
I decided to learn to ride a dirtbike. I took some personal instruction from an expert, and promptly crashed. Again and again and again. Finally, my body figured out how to coordinate the controls.
Can't learn how to double clutch downshift from watching a video, either.
WalterBright
I drive a stick car. Shifting gears happens smoothly without any conscious thought. Not with the dirtbike.
Every time, I have to stop and think through it step by step. My recent rides have all been constantly up and down shifting, in order to get it properly into muscle memory. I was annoyed that my car shifting skills did not transfer.
socalgal2
NASA Video on how hard it can be to learn to surf
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wn5KqWwP6uQ
Basically lots and lots of lots of practice.
yogurtboy
Not sure if you're being witty, but for the unaware, the channel here is that of Tom Sachs, an extremely successful artist who uses the aesthetics of NASA (among other orgs) in order to sort of capture their essence. This is not from NASA.
I'm a little personally split on Tom Sachs as an artist, as he is constantly riding the line between appropriating the aesthetics of respectable institutions and actually emulating their positive qualities.
jrussino
Just wanted to point out - because I was curious as to why they would post a video about learning to surf - that this is NOT a NASA video. This is from the channel of someone named "Tom Sachs", who happens to be using the NASA logo as his youtube avatar image.
> These films are required viewing for Tom Sachs' studio. They comprise guides to studio practice and documentation of specific projects and installations. The movies represent aspects of the sculptures that exist in time. These films will enhance your experience with the work and are the prerequisite for any studio visit, employment application, or interview. Most were made in collaboration with Van and Casey Neistat.
socalgal2
thanks!! I’m was unaware of that.
The video is really good tho, not that that excuses the logo issue :(
WalterBright
My time on a wakeboard transferred fairly successfully to a snowboard.
taneq
Teaching is hard and training courses are often terrible. IMO, lessons need to consist of multiple (usually hierarchical) examples of (1) specific thing to learn, (2) high level motivation for doing this thing, (3) specifically when to do the thing, (4) specific causes and effects between your actions and observations during the process.
I did a snowboarding course once, and it was largely useless because they didn’t actually explain any of the mechanics of how the board actually worked beyond seesawing mostly-sideways down the ultra beginner slope. It wasn’t until I had a chance to experiment that I started actually figuring out anything useful.
I absolutely taught myself how to double-clutch from YouTube and Initial D, though. :D (Plus copious practice, of course.)
WalterBright
I taught myself how to ride a bicycle, but was baffled for a long time how the bike stayed up. I did some very careful observation of what my body was doing to make it work, and finally figured it out. I've had some difficulty transferring that skill to the dirtbike, and spend a fair amount of practice time just doing figure eights.
Another weird thing. I've been using the same text editor for 40 years. I no longer remember what the commands are - but I can still edit files just fine. Sometimes I watch my fingers to see what the command actually is.
quibono
> I no longer remember what the commands are - but I can still edit files just fine. Sometimes I watch my fingers to see what the command actually is.
I learned how to solve the Rubik cube some years ago and I found the same thing. I instinctively know the sequence of steps but I would find it very hard to actually write it down.
beloch
Medieval craftsmen often ran what we would consider to be sweatshops, with many young (i.e. child) apprentices banging out work and not receiving much instruction in exchange. We're romanticizing and idealizing a past that was, in realty, often quite exploitative.
There are reasons why we started sending children to schools rather than businesses for basic education. There is also little need to reach back to medieval times when comparatively less exploitative (but still imperfect) apprenticeship systems are alive and well in the trades today.
One-on-one practical instruction related specifically to what you want to do is awesome, but there are a lot of difficulties in incentivizing people to supply such instruction.
1718627440
Even manufacturing without instructions gives you practice. Also you need only so much instructions per practice, getting instructions won't actually help you get better you also need to do it.
The master very much cares about your quality, because if it doesn't look like his quality nobody will buy it. If the quality goes down to much, there will be complaints to the guilt and he looses its ability to do business.
If you have problems with your master you can look for another one. The good always needed to reject prentices, the bad had nobody showing up. In-fact you were required to stay with multiple masters.
If you complain about them not having an 8-hour day, nobody had that in the middle ages. But tradesman were more of the richer people in a city, maybe behind tradesman.
watwut
In medieval setup, no you could not just look for another master. That is not how the society functioned. There was hierarchy and you had your place in it - bottom.
Also, apprentices duties involved also general housework and pretty much any random thing they told you to do. They would beat you if they thought you do not do what they want and you would be serving literally whole day and that was it. And no it was not whole day of learning. Based on book I read, that frequently involved things wife of the master ordered - they had nothing to do with the trade and that was normal.
With eating, you would wait behind the master while their lunch and tend eat whatever remained.
1718627440
> general housework, wife of the master ordered
Yes you were part of the family for better and for worse. I don't see how that is problematic, you weren't working for a different household, you were just part of this household.
> They would beat you
Sure life sucked back than. There is a reason we are not in the middle ages anymore. I would say that was more a problem with the general attitude in society, not specific to masters.
> no you could not just look for another master
But you were required to look for a different master every few years? That claim doesn't make sense to me.
Of course not everything was all roses, it was just different. You didn't had a social net from the state, there wasn't an independent police you could report beatings from the master. On the other hand you had a social security net by the family/household currently living in (meaning your master's in this case) and if you have rows with everyone you can just walk for a day to the next city, where nobody knows you, and start afresh. The latter isn't possible now anymore.
RataNova
The romanticism around apprenticeships misses how tricky it is to scale personalized, practical instruction without either underpaying the instructor or pricing out the learner
towledev
Very true, but the benefit to one-on-one instruction is so enormous that we should find ways to apply it fractionally if we can’t apply it fully. One thinks eg of the one-room schoolhouses of the 1800s, with younger students learning from older students.
jojomodding
It's still that way. Germany has an apprenticeship system that is supposed to work just like the medieval system: You work in a company for 2-3 years at low pay, but you get trained in return. (Nowadays you spend some of that time in a trade school). The promise often is that if you do good, the company will hire you as a regular employee afterwards.
Unfortunately, experiences vary. The promise works out for some, but others have a shitty boss that does not teach them anything and makes them do menial jobs that do not require or teach any special skills (e.g. cleaning up the workshop or cooking coffee).
bluenose69
The author is a good writer, able to expand upon (and illustrate) ideas articulately and convincingly. However, quite a lot of this doesn't quite apply to actual practice in education, particularly in science.
High-school and undergraduate science classes tend to pair lectures with labs. Practical work is very much the focus of those labs, and the lab instructors work closely with students who need help. And a postgraduate degree typically involves a student working side-by-side with a professor on practical work.
As for the pyramid model, I think the author makes some good points, especially for the grade-school level. However, it's simply a fact that being comfortable with adding comes in handy before moving on to multiplying.
Good teachers find ways to motivate students, and adjust those ways as the years flow by. They know how to do their job, and I trust them to find the best practices.
One thing I've heard from many teachers, especially those who are notably effective, is that teaching theorists are not of much help. And I see that in the silly trends that higher-ups impose on teachers. That way of teaching multiplication that has worked for generations? No good -- we must scrap it. The practice of teaching students to write cursive? So quaint - time to toss that in the trash bin. Years later, I see the results of these trends, when students come to university.
The problem of teaching theorists coming up with silly ideas is a result, I fear, of the system of educating educators. How do you get a PhD in a subject? You have to come up with a new idea. Nobody got an advanced graduate degree in education by writing a thesis that said "teaching is fine as it is." No, that PhD student has to say "this is broken, and here's how to fix it." But some things just aren't quite broken, not really. Sure, some adjustments might be helpful. More one-on-one tutoring would be great. Although then, the non-theorist immediately sees a problem: we don't have enough teachers, as it is.
obscurette
It's not that bad in theory, but it's true that modern "no homework!", "no boring practice!" etc directions have done a lot of damage during last decades. But it answers quite well to common complaints why we are still learn to solve quadratic function in school although almost nobody uses it later in their lives? It's because quadratic function is a simplest way to lay a foundation to understand a tons of broad theoretical concepts about functions – turning points, zeros, decreasing, increasing, symmetry etc.
somenameforme
I'd generalize this even further. Math, especially higher level math, often turns into a sort of puzzle. And solving quadratic equations is the first step going from learning how to execute basic arithmetic to using it in the process of solving a puzzle.
The fact that these puzzles can then be used to do cool things is almost just a fortunate coincidence.
paulgerhardt
I would wager the benefits of this model come mostly from the 2 sigma boost one gets from one on one instruction and not from any sort of optimal skill tree progression a master would impart on a student in a pedagogical environment engineered for optimal knowledge and skill acquisition.
zdragnar
> a pedagogical environment engineered for optimal knowledge and skill acquisition
I'm not sure how many of those we have available to us. Many are compromised by politics, funding, or the need to act as a daycare.
I learned a lot at the various schools I went to, but the amount I learned seemed to correlate more directly with how invested I was in learning than how well the school was funded. Plenty of schools with better per-pupil funding had significantly worse student achievement rates than where I was.
The only real exception to that is not all schools offer the same curriculum. Back in my day, not every secondary / high school had someone who could teach calculus, though now there's districts that are getting rid of calculus entirely to promote anti-racism. Honestly, I think learning calculus in high school was good for me, even if I've really only needed to calculate integrals once in my programming career.
At University, things were much the same. Undergrad courses focused a bit more on synthesizing than memorizing compared to high school, but not really by much.
All of this is to say that I'm not really sure it's fair to knock the apprentice program since we don't directly experience optimal pedagogy elsewhere.
WalterBright
> Undergrad courses focused a bit more on synthesizing than memorizing compared to high school, but not really by much.
Sorry about that. At Caltech, we were never given formulas. Everything was derived from scratch. I never memorized anything (but I found after a while I simply knew all the trig identifies!).
chmod775
Apprenticeship is alive and well across Europe, most famously probably in Germany. The majority of young adults there completes one.
red_trumpet
> The majority of young adults there completes one.
Are you sure about this? Your quoted article only has data from >20 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if nowadays more people study at university than do an apprenticeship
maverwa
Combining both is also pretty common in my experience. People frist do an apprenticeship, then, for example because their employment situation changed, they go to university. There are ways for a apprenticeship to qualifiy one to go for university.
In 2024, according to the "Bundesinstituts für Berufsbildung" 486,700 people started their apprenticeship [0]. In the same period (2024-2025) 490,304 people started their first semester at university/college, according to the "Statistisches Bundesamt" [1].
So you are right, theres more new students than apprentices, but its not by a lot.
[0]: https://www.bibb.de/de/201811.php [1]: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bildun...
hutattedonmyarm
Based on my experience and not hard data: Not most, but still quite a few. Some jobs more or less require an apprenticeship (carpenter and other handy jobs). Doing an apprenticeship for a job and afterwards going to university also happens a lot
danielam
Apprenticeship is generally for the so-called servile arts. The article completely neglects medieval education in the form of the liberal arts, and specifically the trivium and quadrivium. These are experiencing a minor resurgence in various forms in classical education curricula.
harimau777
I feel like this article hits on a good observation but draws the wrong conclusion. Education may have very well come to underemphasize practice. However, I think that a pure learning by doing approach throws the baby out with the bathwater. It's also not what I've observed in my (admittedly limited) experience with apprenticship:
I worked as a field service engineer setting up servers and similar systems for a while. The place I was sent wasn't a union job but many of the workers were from the local union. I was very impressed with the apprentices. They would work half their week at our site and the other half attended training at the union hall. It seemed to work well for everyone: they seemed to learn a lot, the union developed it's next generation, and we effectively got an extra worker for half of every week.
It would be interesting to see a model like (half on the job and half in the classroom) that applied to more professions. E.g. in programming, universities seem to neglect the practice while bootcamps seem to neglect the theory.
jjcob
So I don't know what medical education is like in other parts of the world, but in Austria it involves a lot of practice. Doctors spend a lot of time practicing medicine under supervision before they are allowed to practice on their own. Specialists work as "assistant doctors" for a few years before they can open their own specialist practice.
It's not a question of theory or practice; you obviously need both to learn advanced skills.
rodrigo975
You mean, they start practicing before learning the theory, or they learn the theory then start practicing :p
jjcob
Sorry I got confused by the many meanings of practice :)
xivzgrev
People back then just needed to learn one skill, say baking. Then they ply that trade for their lives.
Our economy changes so fast that we need more generalized skills to adapt. If you were apprenticed as a telephone operator, what would you have done? So we learn math, science, communication, etc.
Kids are absolutely right - much of it you will never use to make money. But if you learn how to learn, then that will help make you successful no matter where you go.
thesuitonym
I think this article shows nicely what we in modern days get wrong about education, even though it's premise is wrong in my opinion. These are just my opinions, and I am not an educator by trade, so take it for what it's worth.
This article starts with the premise that we go to school to learn how to work. In a world where that is the case, yeah, apprenticeships are far better. It happens that many people look at schooling that way, but I don't believe that's even the correct way to think about schooling.
School originally was not about learning to do a job. It was about learning how to learn. That's why writing papers and doing homework used to be such a big deal, because while you might have been stuffing your brain with knowledge about, say the history of bronze-age Europe, what you were really doing was learning how to find facts, how to organize them, and how to take useful notes.
The problem is that in the past 80 years or so, we've started to see school as training to work. Whether it's primary school teaching us to be good factory workers, or college teaching us to be good office workers. College and university came to be viewed as a way for poor children to move up the social ladder. But to do that, you need a good job. And the best way to get that good job is to teach you to do it in university. So you end up in a situation where schools don't teach students how to learn, and since group instruction is a bad way to learn how to do a job, they don't really teach students how to do a job either. And in some countries you pay out the nose for the privilege.
TFA misses a key difference between apprenticeship and classroom learning. Apprentice training tends to be one-on-one. When classroom instruction is done one-on-one, learning dramatically improves. This is called the "two sigma problem" in the educational literature. Ignoring this aspect gives the other factors discussed in TFA exaggerated significance.