Every Kid Deserves Their Own Aristotle

If you were a king and the future of your kingdom depended on the person your son became, what would you do about his education? Philip of Macedon chose Aristotle to teach Alexander. Plutarch's account gives us an image of education taken with extraordinary seriousness: find a great mind and bring it into sustained contact with the young person whose judgment will matter. Every kid deserves that seriousness, even if the inheritance is considerably smaller than Macedonia.

A king can leave territory, money, and an army. He cannot leave the right answer to every decision his heir will face. Circumstances change, people disagree, and power magnifies bad judgment as readily as good. Education addresses the part of the future that cannot be specified in advance, the person who will have to understand an unfamiliar situation and act within it. That is why an investment in a mind can have consequences far beyond the lessons themselves.

A tutor could begin with an apparently obvious claim: a decision was wise because it succeeded. But would the decision have been unwise if an unlikely accident had spoiled it? Could a reckless decision turn out well? The question becomes demanding as soon as the student has to separate good reasoning from good fortune. A printed answer can announce that distinction; a person attending to this learner can discover why the distinction is difficult for them and keep the conversation there until it becomes usable.

This is the educational ideal I mean by an Aristotle for every student. One learner needs a particular case before the distinction makes sense. Another sees the case immediately and wants to ask how far judgment can ever be separated from consequences. They deserve different next questions because they have reached different places in the argument. Attention becomes demanding precisely because it follows the mind answering, instead of allowing everyone to hide behind the same agreeable conclusion.

Alexander's career does not establish that a tutor causes greatness, and the ability to conquer is hardly a sufficient account of living well. What interests me in Philip's choice is the seriousness with which he treated the development of judgment. A future ruler's opinions would eventually carry armies and resources with them. Education mattered because the person exercising that power could not be replaced by a collection of instructions his father left behind. The ordinary child's future is smaller in political scale, but it presents the same problem of decisions nobody else can make in advance.

Your child will also encounter a future you cannot arrange for them. They will have to judge claims, choose work, deal with mistakes, and build relationships with people who see things differently. Those abilities deserve serious cultivation before the stakes become unavoidable. A personal education can use today's book, disagreement, or project to exercise them now. The child is practicing the use of a mind they will have to inhabit for the rest of their life.

Providing that kind of attention has been expensive because an expert has only so many hours. I built TheHomeschoolingCompany to make more responsive explanation and challenge available through technology, within an education directed toward the learner's own goals. The useful promise is that a difficult question has somewhere to go and can lead to another, more demanding one. A famous mentor's name would accomplish nothing if the student's confusion simply met the same explanation again.

I want education to begin from the conviction that your child's mind matters before anybody knows what they will accomplish. Give them ideas worth wrestling with and attention that makes the wrestling productive. Expect more of them as they become more capable. Royal children were never the only children whose futures deserved that investment, and inherited status should never have been the price of an education that takes a person seriously.