Tutoring

English Articles of Tutoring

Individualized, one-to-one teaching of a student by a tutor engaged and paid for by the student or the student’s family or guardian. Though modern private instruction at the elementary and secondary education levels is largely limited to HOME SCHOOLING, SPECIAL EDUCATION and lessons in instrumental music, it was the most common form of instruction in early modern England and in the American colonies. With education in 16th- and 17th-century England largely reserved for the wealthy nobility, the latter usually engaged skilled masters in each of the basic subjects they expected their children to learn. In addition to classical academics, private instruction usually included dance, music, swordsmanship, horsemanship and other arts and skills. Schools, as such, were largely reserved for boys preparing for the ministry. Although the early settlers in the American colonies were quick to found primary schools, most were in towns of at least 50 to 100 families, thus leaving children in more isolated areas without access to education except by private instructors. Some of the latter were ministers; others were local parents who were literate enough to teach neighbor children to read, write and calculate for a fee. Still others were itinerant instructors.

By about 1690, there were still fewer than 50 schools in the English colonies. Meanwhile, towns were expanding, trade and industry were thriving and the demand for trained workers soared. Although a swarm of self-instruction books provided many of the young with useful knowledge, apprenticeships and private instruction remained the most effective methods of obtaining a practical education. The former entailed a long and often unpleasant period of semi-servitude; the latter was relatively quick and easy and, though costly, permitted the student to maintain a full-time job that provided funds to pay for his instruction.

The demand for such instruction brought hundreds of private teachers to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Haven, Albany, Norfolk and other towns to teach surveying, navigation, bookkeeping, accounting, commerce and other practical arts, as well as academic subjects and even such gentle arts as dancing, needlework and fencing. Philadelphia alone had at least 136 private instructors between 1740 and 1776. Private instruction proved a boon for both teachers and students. The latter could take lessons in the morning, afternoon or evening to accommodate their work schedules. For some tutors, private instruction was a full-time occupation, and some went on to found schools of their own. For others with full-time jobs, private instruction proved a lucrative way of augmenting their income. Thus, scriveners, accountants, translators, surveyors and even merchants spent their off-hours teaching their trades.

In rural areas, itinerant tutors traveled from town to town, offering all levels of primary and secondary education, often tutoring in Greek, Latin and the classics required for acceptance into college. For communities without grammar schools or a learned minister, such itinerant teachers opened the door to higher education that would ordinarily have been shut to rural youngsters. One provided the necessary classical education for Horace Mann to enroll in BROWN UNIVERSITY in 1819. Some obtained retainers from the wealthy, who continued to educate their children at home, but their broader roll in public education diminished to specific instruction unavailable in school—instrumental music, fine art, the dance and, in some instances, special education. As the number of common schools, grammar schools and academies increased in the 19th century, the need for such private instruction diminished. In the decades following the Civil War, as state-run public school systems emerged along with private preparatory schools for the children of the wealthy, private instruction as a force in American education disappeared. Private instructors either became instructors in schools or founded their own entrepreneurial institutions.

The tutoring industry expanded exponentially, however, after passage of the NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT OF 2001, which allows parents in failing public schools to transfer their children to other scholars or to charter schools and to use $500 to $1000 of federal moneys paid to their former schools for private tutoring and after-school and summer school classes. More than 80,000 students in New York City alone are now availing themselves of tutoring services, and 14,000 in Chicago. With $2 billion in NCLB funds earmarked for tutoring, commercial tutoring exploded into a $200 milliona- year industry in 2005, and more than 1,800 “supplemental educational services providers” sent an army of tutors into failing public schools across America.