And it’s more accessible than ever before.
It’s 1847 in the maternity ward of Vienna General Hospital, where childbirth mortality rates are scary high — that is, until one physician named Ignaz Semmelweis makes a discovery that changes everything.
He notices that one maternity ward, staffed by midwives, has significantly lower death rates than the ward run by professional doctors. So, he casts off all notions of the prevailing medical dogma of the time and instead, directs his full attention towards this single maternity ward. His discovery? Medical students were moving directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies — without washing their hands. The fix was simple. Wash your hands before treating every single patient. No exceptions.
Just like that, mortality rates dropped almost 20%. And yes, this relates to education more than you think.
Personalized attention begets transformative outcomes.
One-on-one education has always been the most potent form of learning. Did you know that aristocrats refused to travel without their personal tutors? There is even a distinct connection between one-on-one tutoring and the creation of genius: Einstein had Max Talmud, Virginia Woolf had Janet Case, Mozart had his father — the list goes on.
But somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the thread. Tutoring became an after-school program replete with SAT prep questions and bored kids perpetually eyeing the clock on the wall. I’d even venture to say that tutoring is now a negative thing. It’s an embarrassed confession, an admission of failure. “I have a tutor” is shorthand for “I’m not good enough.”
How did we let this happen?
The truth is, personalized learning works. It’s why we fall back on tutoring when classrooms fail. And it’s more than just intuition; it’s science. Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom proved this decades ago in 1984 with his famous 2 Sigma Problem: students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations better than their peers in conventional classrooms, outperforming 98% of their classmates.
Two sigma! Twice as effective!
graph from Learner
Personalized education doubles learning efficacy for kids; and it’s been every educator’s dream to implement this everywhere for the last 200 years. But there’s been very little we could do about it.
Most families can’t afford to pay for a tutor (much less their air fare), and it’s impossible to provide entire classrooms with a personalized curriculum. And even if that was possible, we’d be scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find 1) skilled-enough tutors, and 2) enough skilled-enough tutors. This is why Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem is just that: a problem. Individualized education, while ideal, has never been feasible.
Until now.
AI makes personalized education for every kid possible
Did you know that AI tutors are now more effective than Harvard professors? Not only do Harvard students learn more than twice as much with AI, they learn in less time with more motivation.
You wouldn’t think it’s possible, but it is. And that’s just the beginning. Let’s look at some more numbers.
On average, personalized education leads to:
