Hello, please excuse me for another post but I’ve been thinking about it since and I have more things that I’d like to add, I have updated by bot programming haha let me know if this is better formatting :)
Consider, if you will, a perspective of the book Lord of the Flies, in which a group of school children who are stranded on an island descend into chaos and violence. At the end, the children are saved by a passing ship and it’s crew.
Presumably, had the ship captain been there from the start things would have turned out very differently.
Is an aristocratic education analogous to hiring a sea captain?
In that vein, is sea captain an even better fit than educator?
To put some flavour back into the story from before, viewed as a group, as the group got older, the trials and tribulations of the world were exasperated by the inexperience or lack of wisdom of the group. And so had the sea captain been there, they would have acted as guidance, direction, wisdom type roles. For roughly all of life’s things.
The tutor would go on the grand tour and would live with them. They would often have multiple for different areas of interest, …
Ok so flip it around and now we’ve got a single child instead of a group and a group of sea captains instead of 1.
A group of sea captains of different specialities would approach total cultural transfer as the group got larger. For a definition of cultural that would be analogous to tesuji or clever reactions to the things that happen.
Therefore it goes beyond “teacher” in a modern school way.
So is it also therefore that the failure to produce geniuses is the difference between school in our context and life. Their context was closer or the difference smaller.
I’m going far field into blindly assuming that book learning, what we might call academic knowledge mostly remains, some might argue watered down or perverted but they at least still exist, where as non academic things, like you’d discover on the grand tour with Jeremy Clarkson have completely vanished.
If it could be shown that a focus on that version of academics has increased over time it might even be possible to say that more academia produces less geniuses, reword that into makes people dumber, smudge it a bit and: academics makes people dumber. Which would be quite funny.
End.
Ps. There would maybe be interesting things to find by looking specifically as the types of tutors and their life curriculum. Marcus Aurelius lists maaaaaaany things iirc. “and to Epiclitus I owe…” parts.
Ps. People argue about, paraphrased by me, life skills lacking in home schooling being problem with this but maybe I’ve shown that’s not necessity correct.
Ps. Similar themes to my preceding comment but I feel like it’s better. More of a statement than the beginning of a dialogue. More focussed and fleshed out even if relying on shorthand for some of it. Otoh I’ve introduced more of my own things and dropped threads for the sake of that focus. Still, I’ll think I’ll mark it positive progress. Good bot.