"A family located in North London is looking for an remarkable and skilled tutor to guide their most junior child on his early path to turning into an English gentleman."
Upon seeing this post, you might naturally miss the wording "beginning" as simple figurative language.
But, it might be the crucial element of this unusual employment listing, as it attempts to find a tutor for a one-year-old.
Numerous of responses have since been submitted since the unidentified family published their request for the £180k-a-year tutor, who needs to be "an exceptional individual".
In recent few weeks, the advert has gained interest across the press, with several wondering why?
Progressive Approach
The CEO, CEO and founder of an education consultancy, which is helping the family in their search, said that despite first skepticism, he considered the plan "far sighted", and "advanced".
When he met the family, he said they recognized the atypical nature of their requirement, and how young their son is.
However, they explained that they "didn't want to wait any longer" to get a tutor, as they had postponed until their firstborn was five, and by that point "cultural bias had already become established".
But what does the family refer to by "cultural bias"?
It's "everything", Adam replied. "How you eat, how you speak".
He said the firstborn had adopted "really subtle, unspoken signals" from the family, and had assumed their cultural norms. The family told Adam they did not want history to repeat itself with their new baby.
The plan: To engage a British tutor, who must speak with Received Pronunciation, to shape the baby from the very start.
Natural Absorption
"Much of the development at the start here is rather absorbed naturally," said the expert.
It's by means of this subtle influence that the family are expecting the child will adopt the English characteristics they want to impart.
He said the tutor must be an individual who went to "the appropriate educational institutions – the same kinds of schools as the family plan to send their son to".
"The instructor just has to be the right kind of person, they'll be carrying out things they may not realize they're doing, simply by nature," he added.
Cost Not Relevant
The family told him the chosen tutor should ideally also have knowledge of or passion in horse riding, winter sports, artistic pursuits and music so as to shape the child in a diverse set of hobbies.
More than that though, he stated the family hoped the tutor to enrol the child on a range of lessons so the child would be "pony-riding and starting an tool by the time they are approximately three years old".
In the family's view, helping their son become a "British gentleman" will lead to accomplishment and create opportunities.
"For all the pros and cons of that, because it's certainly a status symbol," he notes.
But, notwithstanding all this guidance in "Britishness", would the child adopt alleged cultural bias from the multicultural family he is raised by anyway?
"Yes", said Adam. "The parents realize this may not work, but they've just taken the attitude of, 'we should try and we'll proceed as soon as we can', because the cost of it is not a concern," he said.
Impractical
There are some in the private teaching field who share those doubts.
Peter Cui, CEO and founder of Blue Education, who provides individual instructors, stated that "the development of becoming bicultural, or indeed, forming one's identity, is something that must be grown into, not engineered."
He explained that he had emigrated from China to the UK at the age of childhood, and had been brought up experiencing and living both cultures. He progressed to be educated at a prestigious UK institution.
"The idea that an individual can serve as a living vessel of English culture, someone who can somehow impart the characteristics of a British gentleman upon a infant child, strikes me as naive and unfeasible," he wrote.
"In my experience, employing a typically UK tutor from early childhood will not necessarily produce the result they want.
"I never had such a tutor, and nevertheless I have been privileged enough to live numerous of the situations they hope for their son."
He added: "The truth is, self-identity cannot be dictated from the outside; it must be chosen, and it must come from within."
Buying Britishness
Certainly, Britishness is something the expert believes can be educated – and marketed.
"I believe the reality that the global community regards us in this respect is something that we should be cherishing|valuing|appreciating
