The art of tutoring is as old as education itself. In the early days, before the Industrial Revolution, before there was such a thing as mass education, children were taught the basic educational skills by tutors, or in very small school houses. The wealthy hired tutors not only to instruct their children in the necessary skills of reading and writing, but also to provide a proper moral upbringing. The hiring of a tutor was considered a very important business. John Locke, the English philosopher and educator, writing in the 17th century, described the difficult problem of finding a good tutor who, he insisted, should have “sobriety, temperence, tenderness, diligence, and discretion,” qualities he considered as “hardly to be found united in persons that are to be had for ordinary salaries nor easily to be found anywhere.” He explained further:

The great difficulty whill be where to find a proper person. For those of small age, parts, and virtue are unfit for this employment; and those that have greater will hardly be got to undertake such a charge. You must therefore look out early and enquire everywhere, for the world has people of all sorts… If you find it difficult to meet with such a tutor as we desire, you are not to wonder. I only can say, spare no care nor cost to get such an one. All things are to be had that way, and I dare assure you that if you can get a good one, you will never repent the charge but will always have the satisfaction to think it the money of all other the best laid out.

Of course, the kind of tutors John Locke wrote about (the tutors who served the aristocracy of preindustrial times) are not the kind needed today. The tutoring we need is of a much more limited kind, resembling the situation of a person who gives piano lessons. Yet, even tutors on this limited scale must have certain qualities which make them successful in their tutoring. If you intend to tutor children you should be fond of children, have enormous patience, be affectionate, and understand the young mind; its eagerness, its curiosity, its tendency to wander from the difficult problems at hand, and its resistance to required effort. So, it does take considerable skill to teach a child. The three most important ingredients of good tutoring, however, are patience, an understanding of the young mind, and a knowledge of the subject you are teaching.

Children also have very strong egos. Their desire to succeed is very great, and success in learning is important to their self-esteem. Therefore, they must be taught in very gradual steps, so that success is assured by the simplicity of what is taught. Never show impatience if the child does not catch on. There may be something in the way you are presenting the subject, or some distraction on the part of the child, or some slowness in the child’s ability to understand what you are driving at. Perhaps the child has not fully digested the previous lesson. It may even be necessary to go one step backward before you can take the next two steps forward.

The child’s self-esteem is as fragile as his constitution. You would not expect him to carry a heavier weight than his physical strength permitted. Likewise, you must not expect him to understand something too complex for his young mind to grasp. And you must not expect him to learn easily or well if the methods you use are illogical, confusing, or poorly thought-out. We teach the complex by breaking it down into smaller, simpler parts. We start with the simplest and most elementary parts, make sure the child learns them, and proceed from there.

Who is qualified to be a tutor? Anyone willing and able to do the job can tutor. If you are a parent with a high school education, you are eminently qualified to teach the elementary things to your own child – provided you have the time and patience to do so. If you are a high school or college student you may also qualify if you can follow the teaching guidelines & principles, relate well to children, and understand their learning problems. Retired teachers, or course, make excellent tutors, adapting their years of schoolroom experience to the tutoring situation. And finally, there is that large category of married women with college educations who, for one reason or another, do not pursue full-time careers, but have the time, the energy, and the desire to offer tutoring services at home for a few hours a day. For such women, tutoring can indeed be an excellent way of supplementing the family income as well as performing a valuable, needed service for the community. If you charge five dollars an hour and tutor four children a day, that will provide you with one hundred dollars for a five-day week. That one hundred dollars can be used to pay a lot of bills. Of course, you must declare that income on your income tax return, but you can also deduct all the expenses involved in earning that money. Such expenses would include advertising, materials, books, pencils, paper, blackboards, phone calls, postage, and other expenses incurred in earning that money, including, incidentally, the cost of books as well. If you set aside a small room in your house for tutoring, you can deduct all the costs of maintaining that room, namely electricity, heat, and a portion of your total rent.

It is not necessary to have had formal teaching experience to become a good tutor. If you have enjoyed reading to children and answering their questions, then you should enjoy tutoring. With the proper instructional materials, anyone who enjoys children can become a good tutor.

How do you find children who need tutoring? In a small community, word of mouth is the best way. A small sign in front of your house, a short classified advertisement in the local paper, or a notice on the bulletin board of a laundromat or supermarket are some of the ways to make your services known to the community. Also, if you have done schoolteaching in the past, your friends in the school system (teachers, advisors, administrators) might be of some help in locating children who need tutoring. You might even type up a promotional letter explaining that you speicalize in tutoring preschoolers. Have it multilithed and mail it out to families and schools in the area. You might make your services known to women’s clubs, or parent-teacher associations in the area. And, of course, there are the “yellow pages.”

How much to charge depends on how great the demand is for your time and the parents’ ability to pay. An hourly fee of between three and ten dollars can be charged. You might start at the lowest practical fee until your tutoring skills are perfected and your reputation established. By then you should have more requests for your services than you can handle. You might then be justified in charging a higher fee. If you find that you can successfully tutor more than one child at a time, you might still charge the same fee but increase your income by tutoring more than one child in one hour.