Why MIT should preserve the tutorial style in humanities classes
Learning history in a room without a back row
In high school, I took multiple history classes but never learned about the historical complexities in Africa in depth.
This gap in my knowledge bothered me, so when I saw that a course on South Africa and Apartheid (21H.266) was listed for the spring 2026 semester at MIT, I signed up.
On the first day of class, I noticed a problem (or so I thought at the time): There were only two other students in the room.
The small class size made me uneasy at first, because when you do not know the answer to a question in a lecture hall, it is easy to blend in with the crowd in silence. However, the silence feels different in a room containing only three students. It no longer becomes the anonymous silence of a lecture hall, but rather, a palpable, almost physical silence. At the start of the semester, the chance of this silence occurring worried me. I thought that I had to know the answer to all the content before class. Eventually, however, I realized that this silence has allowed me to think, listen, and learn better.
Professor Kenda Mutongi used the first day to explain the tutorial approach of learning we were going to follow because of the small class size. A tutorial is a unique method of teaching that originated at Oxford University. Its whole goal is to create a more personal style of instruction involving a professor and only two or three students. Since then, many universities have adopted this system, but it remains rare at MIT. I didn't realize it at the time, but this experience was going to be an extraordinarily meaningful learning opportunity for me. In a larger class, I might have absorbed the material more passively, but in this tutorial class, I had no choice but to participate actively to make sense of things.
The history we were examining had a lot of complex layers; apartheid in South Africa did not simply consist of a list of laws or a period of racial segregation that could be summarized easily. It was a system constructed through politics, economics, violence, ideology, and daily life. Through our readings and discussions, I began to understand South African history through the lens of oppression and resistance, and as a complex web of choices, contradictions, survival, and struggle.
The tutorial style involves analyzing a lot of content in a short period of time. In the first week of the class, we read the entirety of Clark and Worger’s South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. This book was necessary to provide the vocabulary and chronology we needed before we could begin asking more complex questions. Initially, the reading felt overwhelming because it was full of unfamiliar names and laws. However, the goal of the course was not to memorize everything all at once, but rather to build a foundation that would expand into a map.
Each subsequent week, we added another layer to our understanding. We moved from Afrikaner nationalism to Indian and Colored identities. The next week, we learned about rural life and how it contrasted with urban life in South Africa. We also learned about societal complexities from education to domestic and mine workers, as well as armed resistance and the Black Consciousness Movement.
With every passing week in this class, I understood better how apartheid shaped everything from where people lived, how they worked, how they were educated, how they built communities, and how they resisted.
The format of the course made the learning process so much easier. I found myself trying to come up with ways to respond as a historian would argue in group discussions. Listening to how my peers elaborated on their perspectives was also enlightening. Many times, I realized how my mind could change about a certain topic in real time. The small size of the class made history feel less distant and made my own thoughts more visible to me.
Every week, one person would write the main essay for the designated topic. The remaining two people would receive the essay the day before class and come to class with prepared critiques. During class time, we read our work aloud and began discussing. I had never before been in a classroom where my unfinished thoughts were laid so bare. Yet, over time, this openness became one of the most valuable aspects of the course. I learned a great deal from my classmates' differing approaches to the same readings.
By the end of the semester, I realized that I had not only learned about South Africa and apartheid, but had gained a new and unconventional way of studying history. History became less about memorizing a fixed narrative and more about asking better questions: Who benefits from this system? Whose voices are missing? How do ordinary people survive within structures designed to constrain their lives? What counts as resistance?
This course did not simplify history for me. On the contrary, it made history feel more layered and alive. In the end, I understood a wider breadth of history's complexities and challenges to interpret it. The class pushed me to speak before my ideas were fully formed. I had to listen when discussions with my peers complicated my thinking. It taught me something very important, which is that learning is not solely about receiving information, but also about building knowledge through active discussion. I hope that MIT continues to uphold this tutorial approach in other humanities classes. While the tutorial began as an intimidating room of three students to me, it became a reminder that some of the most expansive learning at MIT can happen in the smallest classrooms.