"A household located in North London wants to find an exceptional and experienced tutor to guide their youngest child on his first steps to growing into an English gentleman."
When reading this advertisement, you might naturally overlook the term "initial stages" as mere an expression.
However, it may be the most significant part of this unusual job advert, as it seeks to recruit a mentor for a one-year-old.
Many of applications have already been sent in since the unnamed family published their call for the £180k-a-year tutor, who has to be "someone very special".
Over the last few weeks, the post has received interest across the press, with several asking why?
Innovative Idea
A tutoring expert, chief executive of a global tutoring firm, which is helping the family in their quest, explained that in spite of initial doubt, he found the plan "far sighted", and "innovative".
When he spoke with the family, he noted they understood the unconventional character of their request, and how immature their son is.
Nevertheless, they clarified that they "were unwilling to delay any longer" to engage a tutor, as they had held off until their older child was five, and by that stage "cultural conditioning had already taken hold".
What exactly did the family mean by "cultural predisposition"?
It's "everything", he responded. "How you eat, the way you speak".
He stated the older sibling had adopted "really subtle, non-verbal cues" from the family, and had taken on their cultural norms. The family explained to Adam they wished to avoid history to recur with their infant.
The strategy: To engage a English tutor, who must speak with Received Pronunciation, to shape the baby from day one.
Natural Absorption
"Much of the learning at the outset here is somewhat osmotic," said the expert.
It's through this osmosis that the family are expecting the child will pick up the British traits they want to cultivate.
Adam noted the tutor must be someone who attended "the right kinds of schools – the same kinds of schools as the family aspire to send their son to".
"The instructor must be the appropriate candidate, they'll be doing things they don't even know they're doing, effortlessly," he commented.
Money No Object
The family explained to him the chosen tutor should ideally also have knowledge of or enthusiasm in riding, alpine skiing, artistic pursuits and instrumental training so as to influence the child in a broad spectrum of hobbies.
More than that though, he said the family wanted the tutor to register 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 minds, guiding their son become a "UK sophisticate" will bring about accomplishment and provide access.
"Taking into account the advantages and disadvantages of that, because it's undoubtedly a status symbol," he comments.
However, despite all this guidance in "Britishness", could the child pick up so-called cultural leaning from the international family he resides with in any case?
"Yes", replied the CEO. "The family know this may not work, but they've just taken the perspective of, 'let's give it a go and let's go as quickly as we can', because the cost of it is irrelevant," he explained.
Idealistic and Unrealistic
A number of in the private teaching field who have these doubts.
An education leader, CEO and founder of an educational organization, who supplies personal educators, wrote that "the journey of embracing two identities, or indeed, forming one's identity, is something that must be grown into, not engineered."
The expert explained that he had emigrated from China to the UK at the time of seven, and had been educated knowing and embodying two backgrounds. He went on to be educated at Cambridge University.
"The concept that one individual can serve as a embodiment of English culture, someone who can somehow transplant the characteristics of a UK sophisticate to a infant child, seems to me optimistic and impractical," he wrote.
"Based on my background, engaging a distinctly British tutor from infancy will will not automatically achieve the outcome they desire.
"I did not have that kind of mentor, and yet I have been lucky enough to live several of the experiences they aspire for their son."
He stated: "The reality is, self-identity cannot be dictated from the external environment; it must be selected, and it must be internally driven."
Purchasing UK Culture
Certainly, English culture is something the CEO believes can be educated – and commercialized.
"I think the fact that the global community views us in this light is something that we should be cherishing|valuing|appreciating
