Transmission of mastery

James A. Garfield, speaking of the legendary professor and longtime president of Williams College, Mark Hopkins, reputedly remarked, “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” This longstanding ideal—a highly talented teacher deeply engaged with a student—has been eclipsed in our time by a bureaucratic conception of education characterized by prescriptive curricula; standardized constraints on teacher discretion, such as rubrics; and continual assessment, not only of students but of professors, no matter how talented. In this paper, I defend the “Mark Hopkins model” as the only conceivable way to produce the transmission of mastery from master to novice.