"A family located in North London wants to find an extraordinary and skilled tutor to guide their youngest child on his early path to becoming an English gentleman."
Upon seeing this post, you might readily miss the wording "beginning" as just a turn of phrase.
However, it might be the crucial part of this distinctive position posting, as it seeks to recruit a mentor for a one-year-old.
Hundreds of responses have now been submitted since the anonymous family advertised their request for the £180,000 per year tutor, who must be "someone very special".
In recent few weeks, the post has gained interest throughout the news, with several questioning why?
Forward-Thinking Method
Adam Caller, head and founder of a global tutoring firm, which is supporting the family in their quest, said that notwithstanding initial doubt, he found the idea "far sighted", and "innovative".
When he spoke with the family, he noted they understood the atypical aspect of their demand, and how immature their son is.
But, they explained that they "preferred not to postpone any longer" to engage a tutor, as they had held off until their elder sibling was five, and by that stage "cultural bias had already become established".
What precisely does the family indicate by "cultural leaning"?
It's "everything", he responded. "How you eat, how you speak".
He explained the elder child had absorbed "really subtle, non-verbal cues" from the family, and had taken on their cultural ways. The family informed Adam they wished to avoid the same situation to repeat itself with their infant.
The plan: To engage a British tutor, who should speak with Received Pronunciation, to shape the baby from day one.
Subtle Influence
"Much of the development at the outset here is kind of absorbed naturally," stated the CEO.
It's via this subtle influence that the family are expecting the child will acquire the British traits they aim to instil.
He explained the tutor had to be someone who attended "prestigious academies – the same kinds of schools as the family hope to send their son to".
"The tutor just has to be the suitable individual, they'll be carrying out things they don't even know they're doing, simply by nature," he added.
Expense Not a Factor
The family informed him the chosen tutor should preferably also have familiarity of or interest in horse riding, skiing, the arts and music so as to influence the child in a broad spectrum of passions.
Furthermore though, he stated the family hoped the tutor to enrol the child on a selection of lessons so the child would be "horseback riding and starting an musical instrument by the time they are about three years old".
In the family's perspective, assisting their son grow into a "British gentleman" will result in accomplishment and create opportunities.
"For all the rights and wrongs of that, because it's undoubtedly a status symbol," he notes.
However, notwithstanding all this tutelage in "Britishness", could the child absorb so-called cultural bias from the globally influenced family he lives with regardless?
"Yes", said Adam. "The family understand this might not succeed, but they've simply adopted the attitude of, 'we should try and let's go as soon as we can', because the expense of it is irrelevant," he explained.
Overly Optimistic
There are some in the private teaching field who share those concerns.
Another CEO, chief executive of an educational organization, who provides private tutors, commented that "the process of adopting dual cultures, or indeed, discovering oneself, is something that must be grown into, not engineered."
The expert noted that he had emigrated from the Far East to the United Kingdom at the age of 7 years old, and had been educated experiencing and practicing dual heritages. He went on to be educated at the University of Cambridge.
"The notion that an individual can function as a living vessel of UK identity, someone who can in some way transplant the attributes of a British gentleman onto a one-year-old child, strikes me as idealistic and impractical," he stated.
"In my experience, having a quintessentially English tutor from babyhood will not automatically create the goal they want.
"I never had such a tutor, and yet I have been privileged enough to experience many of the experiences they desire for their son."
He continued: "The fact is, self-identity should not be dictated from the outside; it must be selected, and it must originate internally."
Buying Britishness
Certainly, English culture is something the expert believes can be educated – and commercialized.
"In my view the fact that the international society regards us in this respect is something that we should be cherishing|valuing|appreciating
