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PODCAST

Tutoring: The Human Superpower

Giles Leeper uses science and storytelling to expose the exciting possibilities that arise from recognizing that tutoring and not classroom teaching is how human brains are uniquely designed to teach and learn.

education social sciences

All Episodes

21:00

Dutch Rise and Fall, American Rise and Fall--Part 1

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2025/10/21

Why is the rise and the decline of the USA so much like the rise and the decline of the Dutch Republic in the 1600s? The 1900s will probably always be remembered by historians as the American Century. But the 1600s was the Dutch Century. Both of these nations had their exceptional rises, their amazing zeniths, and then their declines. But historians have noticed that the details and particulars of both the rise and the decline phases are eerily similar. The symptoms of decline that we're

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17:55

Why did Italy Give Us the Renaissance.... and Fascism?

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2025/09/15

Watch on Youtube for those who prefer visual aids to go with the audio.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2iR9d8XVuE How can the same country that gave us the Renaissance also give us Fascism? Naturally, there are more than one explanation. Yet, if we look through the education lens, we can’t help but notice that Italy gave us the Renaissance when its north was the most educated region in all of Western Europe... BUT it gave us Fascism after centuries of educational stagnation made it into Europe’s

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16:00

What Explains China's Rise, Fall, and Rise Again?

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2025/08/15

Check out the YouTube video here.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlTBjsYuZWI In this series, we're taking a big step back in order to look at education as a force in the big picture of humanity. We're investigating the stories of the civilizations that have spent time in the last 1,000 years as the most educated civilization on the planet--China, Italy, Netherlands, Great Britain, and the USA. They were the ones who pushed the education needle forward. 1,000 years ago, the most literate

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21:31

Did Americans Really Stop Getting Smarter?

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2025/07/02

This episode is also on youtube. You can view that video at this link: https://youtu.be/B8B7pdyLWvkSince 1980, have Americans been getting more educated, less educated, or just holding steady? How would you even answer that question? Literacy and math test scores? Trends in our rising or falling IQ scores? The number of years average Americans are spending in school. Changes in our number of high school and college graduates? Actually, in this episode, we’re going to look at all of that at

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13:09

The Pattern

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2025/05/28

It seems like we're in unprecedented times. And yet, if we stand back and look at the bigger picture, our historical moment is not nearly as unique as we think it is. The USA and much of the western world is stuck in a recurring pattern. And this pattern has everything to do with our shared blindness to the power of sharing education ever more widely within the society.This episode introduces a mini-series of episodes on the recurring nature of this pattern. In it we'll cover some of the other

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30:06

Kindezi Reflections

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/10/24

In 2010, Kathleen Jones and I, Giles Leeper, cofounded a charter school in Atlanta called The Kindezi School. By having just six students per class and splitting them into smaller groups, this school attempted to make tutoring a bedrock of its path to success, while only using the funding levels available to public schools. Kathleen became a teacher and I became its principal. So we had two different experiences of the school we started. Did we accomplish something meaningfully different? Did we do

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23:58

Our Superpower in a Time of Crisis

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/10/09

The teen suicide rate rose by 57% in the decade before the COVID19 pandemic. The US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, thinks "the defining health crisis of our time" is not COVID: it's the mental health crisis, especially the youth mental health crisis. In 2020, he published a book called, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. It's about this crisis and how connecting with one another through conversation and quality time together is our path of healing what

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43:57

The Art of Talking with Children

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/09/24

Conversations with children have a great deal of power. In fact, even simple conversations are an important dimension of our human superpower. The science is unambiguous. Children who have a lot of quality conversations during their childhoods tend to have important advantages over children who do not. These advantages range from language and communication skills to a secure sense of belonging and confidence. But not all conversations are equal… In this episode, we’ll speak with Harvard Professor,

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20:40

The Forgotten Education Revolution of West Virginia

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/09/11

Did you know there was a grassroots, bottom up education revolution in West Virginia? There really was. How did it happen? What did it change? And what were the consequences of it for average West Virginians? These are some of the questions that we’ll be exploring in this episode with the help of Giles Leeper’s great grandfather, Lorimer Cavins, who was there when it happened. He researched educational change extensively in the early 1920s and produced a document in 1925 called, “The Financing of

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34:01

Mindreading

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/08/28

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.

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17:42

Where to Find Millions of Brilliant Tutors

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/08/14

To unleash our superpower would most likely require millions 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.

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16:09

The Cost of Tutoring

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/07/31

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

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31:09

Teaching is Something Costly You Do for Another's...

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/07/16

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

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39:34

“This system probably isn’t going to be a good fit...

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/07/02

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

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36:28

Parental Tutoring Changes Brains: Interview with Dr....

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/06/18

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. Here's a link to the article we discussed.(Full article is behind a paywall)

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33:37

Timmy Matthews Can Learn

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/06/04

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.

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05:16

Trailer

Tutoring: The Human Superpower ·

2024/05/01

For the last three centuries, American communities have been amongst the most educationally radical in the world. The colonial education movement in the 18th century, the common schools movement in the 19th, and the high school movement in the 20th each made a quality education more accessible to everyone. The impact of these education movements contributed to many advances, most of which we now take for granted. But the world didn't stop changing and complexifying.In the 21st century, our

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17 results

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