TUITION

While there are many opportunities for group discussion within Learningguild, the main emphasis of our teaching is, as traditionally at Oxford and Cambridge, on one-with-one guidance aimed at the development of each student's own powers. Students are very different in their needs, levels, present abilities, aims, interests and personal situations, and class teaching often fails to give sufficient help to a particular student because it can take too little account of those factors.

We find out what a particular person needs, and recommend appropriate books, booklets and CDs or cassettes, and lines and methods of work. For many students whose first language is not English and who are at the elementary or intermediate stage of learning English, it is very helpful to practise their pronunciation with the booklet-and-CD (or cassette) Sounds, Words, Sentences, to become thoroughly acquainted with Learningguild Notes on English I, and to use the method we call SSC (Sentences to Study and Change) with many sentences from such a source as the Oxford Basic English Dictionary. More advanced students can work through the book Making up Sentences, with its CDs or cassettes (see publications).

Most of the student's work, therefore, is done not by sitting in a class but at home and at his or her own pace. However, arrangements are made for a teacher (Dr Howes or a colleague) to meet with the student regularly -- usually weekly or fortnightly -- and/or to receive written work for annotation: detailed comments will be made on it to guide the student's progress.

Most of our students are seeking to increase their ability to write and/or speak English well and to compose good essays, reports or thesis-chapters. (Some students wish for help in other areas: see below.) Teaching is a very different thing from editing, and our aim is normally to teach, i.e., above all, to help students to develop skills and sensitivities of their own. Our students include both native speakers of English (especially those who learned little about English grammar and sentence-construction at school, as has been common in the last forty years) and people whose first language is not English.

Fees are agreed upon in relation to the time involved for the teacher and what the student can afford. A student who has a substantial income of his or her own, or has a parent with such an income, might pay $20 per half-hour; but many of our students have not been in that position. Someone who cannot pay more than $15 per half-hour is asked to give regular help to Learningguild, for example in collating our publications or in publicizing the movement, and/or to his or her teacher. In this way we practise mutual help, and no one is denied tuition because of inability to pay a normal fee. Payment is normally made after the end of a month, when an account is presented.

In 2009 John Howes’s individual tutoring is normally given only on Tuesdays and on Thursdays (at his home) and on Friday mornings, when he works with administrators at the University of Melbourne.

John Howes is happy to assist students in a wide range of humanities subjects. He was a Victorian Rhodes Scholar, and has been a schoolteacher in England, Lecturer in Classics at the University of Queensland, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Melbourne, and Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at Cape Town, where he lectured on Mill's Liberty and wrote against apartheid and in favour of an open society. After he and Margaret and their four children returned to Melbourne, he taught in colleges of the University of Melbourne, and for fifteen years maintained a cycle of three courses in philosophy for the Council of Adult Education, producing a book on logic related to a course of the same name, Wonder and Reason. He then began the Learningguild philosophy seminar which is now (2009) in its fifteenth year. He helped Sir Desmond Lee to revise the Penguin edition of Plato's Republic, and continues to study and write about Greek philosophy, in which he took his doctorate. As well as in many branches of philosophy, he will gladly tutor people in Latin, classical Greek or New Testament Greek.

This year there is an afternoon meeting on the first Saturday of most months to talk about English, grammar, punctuation, etc., and related teaching. No charge is made for these meetings. It is hoped that through such series, and by other routes, more people, inclulding some whose first language is not English, will become Learningguild teachers or teaching assistants.