The Alcott Dilemma-Why Good Teaching Doesn't Scale

Why Good Teaching Doesn't Scale (And What Changed Between 1834 and Now)

In 1834, Bronson Alcott opened the Temple School in Boston's Masonic Temple. What happened there over the next five years illuminates a problem that has haunted education for 190 years—and that I've been circling for the last 35 years as a tennis coach.

Alcott had developed a teaching method that worked brilliantly. Individualized Socratic dialogue that awakened perception and developed moral imagination. His students flourished. Parents reported transformations in their children's thinking and character. The school became famous.

Then it collapsed. Not because the method failed. Because it couldn't scale.

The Method That Worked

Alcott's approach was simple in concept, demanding in execution. He arranged students in a circle. He asked questions. He listened to their answers. He asked better questions based on what he heard. He held each child's developmental arc in mind simultaneously. He adapted his inquiry to where each student was, not where the curriculum said they should be.

No rote memorization. No standardized lessons. No lecturing from the front of the room. Instead, conversation as revelation. Dialogue as the vehicle through which perception awakened.

Elizabeth Peabody, who taught at the school and documented what happened there, described it this way: Alcott believed the soul's perception could be awakened through sustained inquiry, but only if the inquiry met each child where they actually were. Not where adults thought they should be. Where they actually were.

It worked because Alcott provided something no textbook could: sustained, individualized attention to how each student was actually thinking. He didn't just deliver information. He helped students develop capacity to perceive, to question, to think for themselves.

The Temple School wasn't transferring knowledge. It was building interpretive capacity. That's a very different thing.

Why It Couldn't Scale

The method required Alcott's constant presence. His undivided attention. His ability to track multiple developmental arcs simultaneously while conducting conversation that met each student where they were.

When enrollment grew, quality declined. You can't conduct individualized Socratic dialogue with 40 students the same way you can with 12. The mathematics don't work. Attention is finite. Human bandwidth has limits.

Alcott tried hiring assistant teachers. It didn't help. The method wasn't about techniques you could train someone to apply. It was about sustained attentiveness that couldn't be distributed across multiple instructors without losing coherence.

He tried systematizing the approach into lesson plans and standardized questions. That killed the soul of it. The moment it became scripted performance instead of responsive dialogue, students could tell the difference. So could Alcott.

The school closed in 1839. Not because the method failed. Because the constraint that made it work—Alcott's personal attention—was also the constraint that prevented it from scaling.

This is the Alcott Dilemma: the most effective method for developing capability requires individual observation, conversational guidance, and adaptive response—which can't scale using human labor alone.

Mann's Solution (Which Wasn't Really a Solution)

Horace Mann watched Alcott's Temple School fail. Mann was Massachusetts's first Secretary of Education. His job was to build educational infrastructure that could work at population scale.

Mann's solution was brilliant for its time: standardization. Common curriculum. Teacher training. Grade levels. Measurable outcomes. Factory-model instruction that could handle hundreds of students per teacher.

It scaled beautifully. Massachusetts built a public education system that became the model for the entire country.

But it sacrificed what Alcott had achieved. Students learned information. They didn't develop interpretive capacity. They could recite answers. They couldn't form questions. They became educated. They didn't become independent thinkers.

Mann knew this. He wasn't blind to the tradeoff. This is a blunt summary of a complex historical moment, but the tradeoff itself is real: Mann calculated that breadth of access mattered more than depth of transformation. Better to educate everyone adequately than to educate a few brilliantly.

For 190 years, that's been the choice: Alcott's depth that can't scale, or Mann's scale that sacrifices depth.

The Same Pattern in Junior Tennis

For 35 years, I've watched the exact same pattern play out in player development.

Elite coaching works when it's individualized. When a coach can track a player's technical development, competitive temperament, mental patterns under pressure, physical maturation, and family dynamics simultaneously. When they can adapt their guidance to where the player actually is, not where the program says they should be.

That level of attention produces results. Players develop faster. Parents understand what's happening better. Coaches can articulate their reasoning instead of just delivering instructions.

But it doesn't scale. You can't provide that level of attention to 50 players the way you can to 8. The mathematics are identical to what Alcott faced in 1834. Human bandwidth hasn't increased in 190 years.

So the industry solved the scaling problem the same way Mann did. Factory models.

Group instruction. Standardized technical progressions. Ball-feeding drills everyone does the same way. Measurable outcomes tied to ranking and results. Efficiency over depth. Programs that can handle hundreds of players because individualized attention doesn't work at population scale.

It scales. Facilities stay full. Revenue increases. Programs can claim big numbers.

But it sacrifices the very thing that makes development actually happen: the interpretive attention that helps individuals understand what they're experiencing. The sustained observation that notices when a player's footwork is compensating for a mental pattern. The adaptive guidance that recognizes when technical regression is actually developmental consolidation.

We chose scale over depth because those seemed like the only options. Alcott or Mann. Quality or quantity. Pick one.

What Changed Between 1834 and Now

Alcott couldn't solve the scaling problem because he needed conversational bandwidth that human labor couldn't provide. One teacher can't hold sustained Socratic dialogue with 40 students simultaneously. The physics don't work.

But I'm working in an era where technology can provide that bandwidth. And crucially, where both the technology is mature enough and the cultural understanding of AI's limits is clear enough to do this responsibly—not as replacement for human judgment, but as infrastructure for it.

Not to replace human judgment. To create infrastructure for it. AI handles context and bandwidth; humans do judgment.

This is the breakthrough: AI as conversational infrastructure, not as teacher.

Here's what that means in practice. Alcott needed to remember what each student had said last week. Track how their thinking was evolving. Recognize patterns across months. Adapt his questions based on where they were developmentally. Maintain that context for 40 students simultaneously.

That's an enormous cognitive load. It's why the method broke when enrollment grew.

AI can handle that information management without breaking a sweat. It can track every student's conversation history. Notice patterns. Surface connections. Maintain context across months. Do this for 40 students or 400 students with the same fidelity.

What it can't do—and shouldn't do—is make the interpretive judgments. That remains human work. Deciding what matters. Weighing competing goods. Making commitments. Exercising taste. Those are fundamentally human capacities.

But when the technology handles the bandwidth problem, humans can focus on what they're actually good at: judgment, moral reasoning, and the kind of attentiveness that notices what machines miss.

The constitutional principle is simple: AI may propose frames; only humans make commitments.

That division is architectural, not optional. The moment AI starts making judgments instead of providing bandwidth for human judgment, the whole thing collapses back into the factory model. Just with fancier technology.

Convergent Invention

I didn't arrive at this solution by studying education theory. I arrived at it by watching what works in other domains that solved similar problems.

Teaching hospitals don't just have residents learn by doing. They institutionalized case presentation. Residents defend their interpretations publicly. Multiple perspectives surface. Bad assumptions get exposed early. Everyone learns by watching how judgment forms. The structure creates bandwidth for learning that wouldn't happen through individual instruction alone.

Design studios don't just teach technique. They built critique culture. The work goes on the table. Multiple voices assess it. Students calibrate by seeing how others reason. The structure amplifies learning without requiring one instructor per student.

Aviation doesn't rely on heroic pilots. They built systematic error analysis. Post-incident reviews focus on decisions, signals, context. The structure creates conditions where judgment improves across the entire profession, not just among the talented few.

Founder forums don't offer advice. They provide frame-testing. Multiple perspectives on the same situation. Pattern recognition from people who've seen similar failure modes. The structure helps founders see what they couldn't see alone.

None of these domains solved the scaling problem with more instruction or better content. They solved it with better architecture. Structures that amplify human judgment instead of trying to automate it away.

The pattern across all of them: distributed cognition beats singular expertise. Multiple perspectives reveal what none could see alone. Structure matters more than charisma. Geometry can scale even when individual attention can't.

I took those principles and asked: what would this look like in junior tennis? What structure would create conditions where parents develop interpretive capacity, coaches can articulate their reasoning, and players learn to observe their own patterns?

The answer became something I call the Founders' Room. Not because it's about founding companies. Because it's about creating conditions where understanding actually forms.

Two Spaces, One Architecture

While studying Alcott, I realized something else. The Temple School had both conversation and physicality. Students sat in circles for dialogue. Then they moved for exercise and observation. Alcott understood that the mind develops through multiple modes, not just verbal reasoning.

That's why the architecture I'm building has two complementary spaces.

The Founders' Room handles reflection and dialogue. It's where interpretation happens. Where frames get tested. Where parents and coaches engage in structured inquiry about what they're actually seeing.

Court 4 handles embodied learning. It's where kinetic discovery happens. Where attention develops through movement. Where the body teaches the mind things language can't reach.

Both spaces serve the same function—creating conditions where understanding forms—but they address different aspects of human development. You can't build complete judgment formation architecture with only reflective space or only kinetic space. You need both.

Alcott understood this intuitively. He just didn't have the infrastructure to make it work at scale.

Now we do.

What This Isn't

This is not replacing coaches with AI. Coaching delivers technical instruction. That's valuable. That's necessary. That's not what's missing.

This is not online courses or information products. Those transmit knowledge. Also valuable. Also not the gap.

This is not therapy or emotional processing. That serves a different function and requires different training.

What's missing is the interpretive layer. The institutional structure where judgment forms through sustained, structured reflection that sits inside ongoing work.

The space where parents stop asking "what should I do?" and start asking "what am I actually seeing?"

Where coaches can articulate how they form judgment, not just what judgments they've formed.

Where players develop self-observation capacity that outlasts any particular program.

The Move Nobody Else Made

The convergent invention gave me the architecture. But if judgment requires combined perspectives—if no single expert can see everything—then the parent cannot remain a customer. They have to be something else.

Here's where the work diverges from everything I've seen in education technology, youth sports, or coaching innovation.

Most systems treat parents as customers to be served, risks to be managed, interference to be minimized, or passive observers watching from the sidelines.

I treat parents as co-founders of a developmental enterprise.

Whether they like it or not. Whether they feel qualified or not. Because they already are.

Every parent of a junior athlete is making decisions about development with incomplete information. That's not consumerism. That's co-founding.

And once you see it that way, everything changes.

That reframe—parents as co-founders rather than customers—is the original contribution. It's what makes this different from every other attempt to "improve youth development" or "leverage AI in education."

It's also the hardest thing to implement. Because it requires completely rethinking the relationship between parents, coaches, and players. It requires new structure. New rituals. New expectations.

But it's the only frame that actually matches the reality of what's happening. And building the right institution requires starting with the right understanding of who's in the room and what they're actually doing.

Next, I'll explain what changes when you see parents as co-founders instead of customers. And why that one reframe unlocks the solution to the Alcott Dilemma.

Next in this series: "Parents as Co-Founders: The Reframe That Changes Everything"

About the author: Duey Evans has been coaching elite junior tennis players for 35 years. He  is building institutional infrastructure that solves the 190-year-old tension between individualized depth and scalable systems.

A note on how to read this series: 

These essays are not meant to be consumed as advice or conclusions. They’re meant to be read as invitations to notice what you may already be experiencing but haven’t had language for yet.

I’m also exploring a companion project built around conversation rather than exposition. Not a podcast about opinions, but a place where questions are examined slowly and publicly.

If this essay sharpened your perception rather than answered your questions, you’re reading it with the right lens.