My Plan for Substack

Paid articles and live Q&A

I have added a paid option for £50/year or £5/month for paid articles and live video Q&A sessions on Zoom. There’s also an option to pay more if you’d like to increase the amount of time I have to spend on this project.

To help you understand how the paid option fits in, here’s an overview of the three main methods of teaching.

1. The Lecture

The word “lecture” comes from the Latin lectus — “to pick out” or “to read.” The lecturer “picks out” what he wants to present in an uninterrupted manner.

The material and the steps the students will go through to understand it are prepared in advance. The lecturer takes the students from what they already know to what they don’t yet know.

As St. Thomas Aquinas says,

“one person is said to teach another inasmuch as, by signs, he manifests to another the reasoning process which he himself goes through by his own natural reason” (De Magistro).

This is I aim at doing for you in my articles/podcasts when, for example, summarising and commenting on books — often neglected ones — that I think it’s important for you to understand.

2. The Tutorial

The word “tutorial” comes from the Latin tutor — “watcher, protector or defender,” related to the verb tueor, “to see, to look or gaze upon, to behold, to regard, to consider, to examine.”

Having been sacked from Eton, this is now how I provide for my wife and six children. I watch over one or a small number of students, protecting them from error and defending the transmission of tradition in education. Students learn far more grammar with me than they would in schools. They also only study classic literature that has stood the test of time: I do not demean them by wasting their time with anything that is unlikely to be read by people in ~250 years.

Because the tutor deals with fewer students than the lecturer, he can consider students’ opinions, questions, and objections as they arise. He can also question his students. This gives him an insight into exactly what his students already know or do not know.

Unlike the lecturer, the tutor teachers engages in informal give-and-take with his students. This means his teaching is always tailored to the specific students. The more astute the tutor’s questions, the better the students’ needs will be revealed. And the tutor, unlike the lecturer, can move freely backward or forward on the path to knowledge depending on what the students require.

The tutorial, then, is to the lecture what the spoken word is to the written word. As Plato shows in the Phaedrus, the spoken word is superior to the written word: whereas the written word, when questioned, merely repeats itself over and over again, the spoken word responds differently to different people (274c-278d).

When clients ask me what I can offer that less expensive tutors can’t, my answer is that I am better at asking the right question at the right time and in the right way. Combined with the constant threat of having to pay attention, this pinpoint exposure of weaknesses is the most powerful teaching tool.

3. The Seminar

The word “seminar” derives from the Latin seminarium — a seedbed. Thus a seminar aims at planting “seeds” for fertilization and growth.

There is no English word for the teacher who uses this method. “Seminarian” refers to the student, not the teacher. Although the teacher prepares the ground, the focus is on the student. The emphasis is on getting students to grow through struggling to understand and articulate their developing knowledge.

The lecturer tells students what he knows. The tutor questions students intensively to find their mistakes and correct them. But in the seminar, the teacher raises questions for the students to grapple with. He doesn’t give answers. He expects his students to develop their reasoning and speaking skills. Because classic works of Western literature raise the question every mind must tackle in the search for wisdom, they are the ideal material for discussion.

Plato has the soon-to-die Socrates warn us in the Phaedo (89d-91c) that endless discussion can degenerate into misology — a hatred of argument or even logos itself. The student sees only verbal battle and conflict power narratives. This is the nihilism of contemporary academia. Because it no longer believes in truth, it has forgotten that if you lose an argument, you win the truth.

Paid Subscriptions

So here’s what the paid option gives you:

• For the lecture, longer and more advanced explanations of important texts and topics, e.g., what Jonathan Bowden got wrong, love and lust The Great Gatsby. These articles will also be narrated for you.

• For the tutorial, paid-subscriber-only discussion threads in addition to the comments on the above articles.

• For the seminar, live Q&A sessions on Zoom: I will crack open an important passage for discussion with a few questions. But these Q&A sessions will also use elements of the lecture and the tutorial. The recordings will be made available afterwards as podcasts.

The paid option also lets you support my free articles: these will continue.

Thanks for the support so far.