Qualified to Tutor History?

This may sound like a silly question to ask a history tutor but ask anyway, do you have a degree in exactly the subject you are tutoring?

You will be surprised as you look at the tuition market to discover just how few history tutors actually hold a history degree.

You have the level 7 or A-ranked student who now they have arrived in the first year of their degree is feeling on top of the world and certain in the knowledge that their brilliance is what got them that top-level history grade — it wasn't it was learning the exam strategies.

You will have the Oxbridge student for whom merely having a degree from a top 10 university is proof enough that they will be brilliant in whatever they choose to do, even if they are tutoring a subject they know absolutely nothing about.

Then you have the generalists who consider that they are experienced enough in teaching that they can tutor their main subject and history… and English, geography, science, mathematics, and anything else you require, for a price of course.

What all three groups of tutors (and there are many more besides) have in common is they don't know the first thing about history because none of them actually have a degree in history. So what you ask? Well to answer that let us consider what a degree actually confers on a student.

Firstly it should come as no surprise that a history graduate should have actually learned a thing or two about history. Not all history I stress, if your tutor studied the Renaissance they probably won't be much good at explaining what Anschluss is. However, a good history tutor should not be explaining historical content to you, that is the job of a textbook, teacher or google.

Secondly, and much more importantly, a history degree teaches tools that are universal to all historical periods and subjects. A history graduate can identify and locate primary and secondary sources. Don’t know where to find sources for your IA? Your history degree-wielding tutor will and they will be able to reference oral testimony, public records & legal documents, and privately held documents as this is their academic lifeblood. Moreover history graduates learn how to read sources critically to evaluate their authenticity and accuarcy.

History graduates also think like, well historians. They have been taught the great schools of Historical thought that are used to interpret and understand the past. Do you for example know your Marxist ideas from your French Annales School? No, well I bet a history graduate would do.

History graduates can research and write historical text. Guess what they are experienced in identifying a research questions (essential in KS3-KS4 and IB DP History), can conduct a literature review, as your child will be required to do, and can use evidence to refine research questions. They also know how to select an appropriate historical method and analyze data to create an argument.

To return to the case of non-history degree-holding tutors, they have no means to understand the nature of the subject because they never studied these tools. They look at history as a soft subject in the sense that all you need to tutor it is to read a book on the subject and then condense this content. This is not enough, tutoring history is not regurgitating facts, it is subject-specific teaching skills. Only a history graduate can do this.

Therefore, in conclusion, always choose a history tutor that has a degree in the subject, or as in my case, multiple degrees in the subject. This is because you are not buying historical content, although if the tutor is a specialist in the exact areas your child is studying then great. This is because you are buying the services of a person who has shown that they understand how history works and this is what is most critical to a successful history tutor.