Students are often effective tutors, because they can most easily identify the areas where another student is having trouble, having recently gone through the same learning process. How then can we encourage them to help one another? Suppose that a school starts a tutoring program with the requirement that in order to receive tutoring, a student must first tutor someone else.

One objection is that a student in need of tutoring is not in a position to tutor someone else, but that student may be just the right person to tutor someone in a lower grade.

Another problem is that in a chain of tutors and tutees, there is a problem with students at the start and end of the chain. Those at the start of the chain have nobody to tutor them and those at the end have nobody to tutor. For students at the end of the chain we could eliminate the requirement to tutor someone else. We could simply say that below a certain grade there is no requirement to tutor someone else.

Those at the start of the chain should receive special recognition. They might be part of a club to help the school administration run the program. Participation would look good on a college application, especially for those who plan to go into teaching. It might even look good on a resume for a first time job.

There are a lot of details that would have to be worked out, but I am throwing this out as a general idea.