Hypatia is founded on the belief that:

• Mass-standardized education is partly responsible for the reduction in genius. This is because by nature it focuses on ensuring everyone receives the same lecture-based information and achieves the same average level.
• The opposite is true in sports, where we continue to break records in everything from sprinting speed to Chess Elos due to intensive selection and 1:1 training of talent. What if we applied the same principle to intellectual pursuits?
• Promisingly, history suggests this is exactly how we used to train our best minds.
• We want to bring back how history’s greatest minds were raised. At Hypatia, curious students are taught 1:1 by scholars, allowing them to progress at a faster pace, and focus on problem-solving and intellectual development over rote memorization and strict adherence to curriculum.

At the advent of the Internet, it was expected that the world would experience an explosion of genius. The widely-held belief was that only a lack of information held the brightest of students back, and that information was suddenly available to billions. Yet, no Golden Age occurred. Innovation rates were unaffected. In fact science has objectively continued to stagnate in its rate of discovery [1, 2, 3], and arguably culture has stagnated alongside it [4, 5]. Much like getting to the moon, the creation of scientific and cultural genius requires not just available schematics, but rocket fuel as well.

In times past, it was known what that fuel was: putting young minds in contact with experts and brilliant teachers in the form of one-on-one tutoring. This was the predominant form of education among the aristocrats of Europe hundreds of years ago [6]. They understood that the education of most geniuses proceeded idiosyncratically. For example, Charles Darwin was tutored at home until 3rd grade. When Darwin entered school, his tutor and sister Caroline (woefully unacknowledged by history) had already instilled within him a fundamental love of collecting specimens and biology (and his further schooling was supplemented by tutoring and mentorship of great minds constantly). Even Oxford and Cambridge used to run entirely on tutoring [7], not the lecture-based system of today. This tradition of aristocratic tutoring continued into the early 20th century, and some of the last great polymaths and contributors of that century, like Bertrand Russell and John von Neumann, were the results.

That this system of governesses and family private tutors produced so much genius (like Newton, Galileo, Huygens, Shelly, Einstein, Faraday, Leibniz, Lovelace, Euler, and Maxwell) is unsurprising in the light of education research in the 20th century. The work of Benjamin Bloom showed in the 1950s that students who underwent one-on-one tutoring not only mastered material much faster, but 98% of tutored students outperformed non-tutored students [8].

However, the field of education research viewed the objective success of tutoring as problematic, since despite it being clearly the best form of education, it was also an inequitable one. Tutoring became merely a last resort for failing kids, or the province of test-score maximizers in the academic rat race. Instead of tutors cultivating a child over months or even years, they became one-offs. And the general goal of tutoring, intellectual development, was forgotten.

Hypatia’s goal is to resurrect the tutoring practices of the past online so you can access a radically better model of education from anywhere in the world. Our tutors are experts, often with Masters or PhDs from elite universities, each coming with their own strengths and interests. We’ve chosen to begin with philosophy given its role at the genesis of so many of humanity’s greatest cultural and scientific achievements. Children are also natural philosophers, which you can read more about here.

What next?

As a first step, we’ll meet with you to discuss your child’s needs and interests, after which we will suggest a match. Hypatia is not teaching to a strict curriculum. Rather, we are focused on general enrichment that develops students across all domains, academic and social. Our tutors will work with students for years, forging a tutoring relationship aimed at cultivating each child’s critical thinking, creativity, and intellect. Eventually, this network of expert-trained youth, far ahead of their peers, will then give back to the world as a whole.

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