The Emperor’s Envy: How AI Is Enabling an Elite Education — For You

The finest education in history can be yours now — for free

The finest education in history can be yours now — for free

Image by Dalle-3 and the author

Does the news make you feel the world’s challenges are getting more difficult?

At times like this, I like to remember something Nelson Mandela once said:

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world

Do you think he’s right? I do.

But have you ever wondered: Do our education systems actually give us the best preparation to face these challenges?

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

We know what one of the best education systems is, and have known this for centuries, and you probably know this system too.

The Kings and Emperors of the past, were educated not in schools and classes but by one-to-one personal tutoring, by the best scholars of the day.

Image by Dalle-3 and the author

Yet most children don’t have access to this kind of personalised tutoring, why? You know why — money.

You know, it’s just not affordable for countries to pay for 1–2–1 personalised tutoring for millions of children, let alone everyone else — to get the best education.

But what if I told you we are on the verge of an AI revolution in education? one that could deliver some of the best, customised 1–2–1 personalised tutoring to all for little cost?

AI Tutors with more knowledge than any human has ever possessed in history? That Kings and Emperors of old could only dream of and envy?

Available right now, to you.

Let me take you on a little tour, of how AI is bringing the best education in history, to you.

The History of education and tutoring

For most of human history — there were no public schools at all for most children.

An article by Superprof looked at this history of tutoring and education and noted:

From antiquity to the Middle Ages, almost no schools, as we would recognise them, existed…It would be more accurate to say that education was exclusively reserved for a small elite. In the Western world, the personal tutors of the day were the philosophers, the sophists, and other teachers of rhetoric

Another name for the 1–2–1 personal tutoring model is the aristocratic tutoring model.

This is how the elite of ancient times, Kings, Emperors, and a select few were educated. Famous historical examples would include Alexander the Great, whose personal tutor was Aristotle.

Image by Dalle-3 and the author

Marcus Aurelius one of the greatest Roman emperors, the philosopher-king, had personal tutors for his education including Fronto the rhetorician, and Diognetus the painter and Stoic philosopher.

From the Middle Ages onwards, there was increasing access to universal education for the wider public, using class-based teaching in various forms.

But how do you know that personal tutoring is better for children than class-based learning?

In the 1980’s an educational psychologist called Benjamin Bloom conducted various extensive studies comparing various educational models, including personal tutoring and class-based learning.

Image by Dalle-3 and the author

What he discovered about tutored students might surprise you. He found that individually tutored students:

…performed two standard deviations (2 sigma) 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”

In plain English, two standard deviations (2 sigma) difference means personal tutoring makes a huge difference to educational outcomes compared to normal class based teaching.

Bloom himself described the results this way:

The tutoring process demonstrates that most of the students do have the potential to reach this high level of learning. I believe that an important task of research and instruction is to seek ways of accomplishing this under more practical and realistic conditions than one-to-one tutoring, which is too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale. This is the ‘2 sigma’ problem

But do you think perhaps Bloom was mistaken in his proposed solution?

Can we deliver one-to-one personal tutoring at scale and little cost?

A Quick recap of AI Fundamentals

As a very quick recap of AI for you, large language models (LLMs) that power AI have been trained on large amounts of textual information, most of the internet, millions of books, documents and more.

Photo by Luke Tanis on Unsplash

These AI’s have read and learned this information, and you can interact with them by asking them questions about the information they have acquired, with services such as ChatGPT — which you may have already tried.

So some key points you should remember here are:

1. These modern AI’s have accumulated more knowledge than any single human has ever known in history

2. These AI’s are available at low cost, in many cases for free, for individual use and at large scale

You also need to know that ‘hallucinations’ are an ongoing issue with these AI’s and is an area of ongoing research and improvement. Hallucinations are the tendency for AI systems to sometimes ‘make stuff up that isn’t true’.

So it’s always advisable to double-check information provided by AI’s especially if its critically important to be precise or correct.

Can AI solve the 2 sigma problem?

We’re at the paywall. If you want to dive deeper into understanding the impact of AI on you, business and society better with full access to all my articles, access to a podcast with insights, and interviews with people from diverse backgrounds, join today for just £6 a month or save 17% with the annual subscription. Hope to help you better understand the potential for AI for you!