It seemed that nine-year-old Henry (a pseudonym) just couldn’t do anything right in the eyes of his male peers at the private day school he attended outside London. He wasn’t particularly sporty. He was hopeless at computer games. He was into playing piano, and most of his friends were girls. It felt to his mother, Romina, more like one of those hierarchical, often cruel boarding schools that she describes as, well, “very British…The ruder the child, the cheekier he was, and it was considered kind of cute,” she says. The boys thought it was hilarious, for instance, to bar Henry from the boys bathroom, saying that he couldn’t come in because he was a girl. So he’d hold it in all day. “He always felt like he didn’t belong,” says Romina. It ate away at his confidence and ability to learn.
Romina might have just sucked it up. Instead, she embarked on plan B. A cultivated, worldly architect—she’s Danish-Japanese, grew up in Italy, moved to London and married a Brit—Romina spent the next few months with Henry traveling. “There was a little bit of, ‘Where does mummy come from.’” Then, back in London, she hired three homeschool instructors. Thirty-four-year-old tutor Madelaine Berlin led the charge, covering English and history, which included a focus on Italy and Japan, tailored to the boy’s background. An Oxford-bound student, taking a year off, covered math. A third young man, a designer-musician whom Romina met at a gallery opening, cultivated the boy’s musical and artistic side. Parents at the school were initially scandalized by the decision. Social phone calls stopped. No one wanted a playdate. There was a bit of resentment, she sensed, the feeling that the family should have been stiff-upper-lip about it. There was also a bit of jealousy, she says. The message? “You’re lucky, you can afford to do that.” After a year and a half of homeschooling, he returned to his old school as a changed person. He was “a million times more confident,” says Romina, and he won the top academic prize his first year back.
Before COVID-19 made homeschooling ubiquitous, Romina was emblematic of a trend, from Silicon Valley to Switzerland to Singapore, of affluent parents who have turned away from traditional schooling in favor of what you might call full-time bespoke tutoring. This international phenomenon is distinct from the Christian homeschooling that has been around since the 1970s, whose most famous byproduct is Tim Tebow. So erase the image you may have of a Karen Pence type, sitting at the kitchen table with her brood, hunched over Exploring Creation: Land Animals of the Sixth Day. And it’s got nothing to do with the hellish months you’ve spent during this current crisis, trying to take over social studies instruction (though some parents with means may now find themselves converts to this expensive strategy). Think, instead, “Laurie” Laurence, the lucky young rake of Little Women, and the virtuous Mr. Brooke, comfortably ensconced in a New England drawing room doing French lessons. Bespoke tutoring is a kind of refurbished version of the 19th-century model—academic enlightenment courtesy of erudite tutors. Among people with means, who live by the ethos that there’s no problem that shouldn’t be fixed if it can be, that education is just one more system that can be tinkered with, tailored, and fully optimized.
There are, naturally, subcategories. In the first group are the celebrities and billionaires (royal families, oligarchs, titans of industry) who travel constantly and want their children with them, like international crooner Julio Iglesias and his model teenage daughters. Then there are the tech-entrepreneur-disrupter types, who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can do school better. Finally, there are quotidian 1 percenters hither and yon who attempt to tackle every possible challenge when it comes to their children. Their kids have been expelled; or have drug problems; or aren’t getting the help they need for learning difficulties; their kids experience bullying and anxiety; or have an athletic focus that requires hours of specialized training each day; or every combination thereof.
“Accomplished dressage and hunter-jumper rider…developing a sense of anxiety,” reads one recent job posting on Oxford-based Tutors International, one of the most prestigious tutoring agencies.
“Reasonably able young man…[with] an occasional issue with some executive functioning skills and can be prone to emotional outbursts when he is upset about something.”
Challenging twins: “The boy is a vegetarian who will only eat dry, crunchy textures, and so exists on a diet of nuts, dried fruit, and crunchy vegetables such as celery and peppers.… parents have aspirations for them to both attend top universities or colleges such as MIT, Harvard, or Oxbridge, but already the twins are behind their current U.S. grade level (1).”
Skeptics may wonder if such needs can be met. More to the point, while bespoke tutoring may help a student get good grades and pass the right tests, can it actually yield a person you’d want to know? The kind of person who can power through unpleasant circumstances, work well with others, roll with it? The results, not surprisingly, are varied and messy. On the one hand, delving into this world reveals many stories of kids like Henry, whose young lives turned around thanks to full-time one-on-one instruction at home. On the other hand, there are myriad variables that can cause the whole experiment to break down, ending either in mild disaster or status quo dysfunction.
Even experts in the field don’t quite agree on what should be the ultimate role of bespoke tutoring in modern society. Adam Caller, who 20 years ago founded Tutors International, is a purist about such robust one-on-one instruction outside of school. He believes traditional curriculum may no longer be relevant in a rapidly changing world. “We could not be heading in a more inappropriate direction for educating the next generation,” says Caller. Parents, he says, are posing the question, “If we want our children to become leaders of tomorrow, then what does their education need to look like that’s different? What skills will they need to have in order to be leaders in a society where artificial intelligence will be doing a lot of things that we currently take for granted? Do they need to use a pen? Probably not. Do they need to learn to be able to talk to computers? Probably yes. Do they need to have social integration into social groups like we consider to be important today? Probably not.” He takes the needs of wealthy individuals very seriously, even offering sea tutoring for clients who spend weeks at a time on their yachts.
Nathaniel McCullagh, founder of another high-end U.K.–based agency, Simply Learning Tuition, views bespoke tutoring more as a stopgap to target a very specific problem, before the child can rejoin the herd. “If a child can go to school and be bumped around with 30 other kids in a classroom and then go home and get the parental support they need, that’s the best,” he says. “Friends, sports, competition, challenge, failure, resilience-building. They need all that stuff and they get it far better at school than at home with a tutor.” While homeschool curricula may be tailored to the particular student’s needs, certain official standards must be met. (In the U.K., many universities require homeschool students to pass their GCSE and A-level exams just like regular students. In the U.S., homeschool requirements vary from state to state.)
Whatever the particulars, all parental clients, and especially—the “very high net worth individuals”—seek the cream of the crop; these instructors are sometimes called “supertutors.” The parents tend to consider Oxford or Cambridge the golden ticket, and will pay as much as $160,000 per year. “The tutor should be an interesting and erudite individual, open-minded, well-traveled, and well-versed in pedagogic theory. He or she will not only be an excellent educator, but also a good role model: educated and polished, with excellent manners and personal values,” is how a job listing on Tutors International puts it. For other families, it would be “advantageous” if a tutor is also a keen sportsman or sportswoman; if the tutor could also teach foreign language to members of the household staff; if the tutor could also assist the mother in logistics of relocating and furnishing multiple homes; if the tutor plays the flute; if the tutor truly grasps what it means to appreciate “quality of life.” It goes without saying that the tutor should not gawk at the family Picassos.
“It’s like an old-fashioned governess role,” says one such Cambridge-educated tutor, who has subsequently become a writer-performer for television and has a supertutor script in the works. Let’s call her Jane Heir. “You have to be mental. You have to be disciplined. You have to be an exceptional polymath to then be paraded about…They want you to be a prized pony: ‘Look what we’ve got.’”
But even prized ponies bunk with the rest of the barnyard. Some billionaire clients view their tutor as just another member of the staff—along with a nanny, housekeeper, chef, driver, and masseuse. “The tutor will be responsible and entirely to blame for our child’s academic progress. Because we don’t want to do the paperwork. We’ll fit the bill,” says Jane Heir, summing up the attitude of such families. Another supertutor, Gillian Harker, an actor-filmmaker who’d been tasked with improving a child’s “critical-thinking” skills, researched age-appropriate games and suggested some to the parents, who were diffident. “The dad sort of said, Well, that’s why we have a tutor. Because we don’t really have time to be doing this.”
Some parents in this category tend to have little self-awareness or capacity for embarrassment. Jane Heir recalls homeschooling the child of Gulf royalty. It was summer and they’d moved with an entourage of staff into their massive London house that otherwise remained unoccupied. “They’d drive around in the most expensive sports cars and go and spend hundreds of thousands of pounds every day,” blissfully unaware, she says, that she was an avowed socialist. When it came to paying her, the father casually brought her to the golden safe, where he took out wads of cash. “They weren’t even careful about revealing where it was. I was like, I could do a heist!” Who cared, or even noticed, that their six-year-old girl was breezily taunting her, telling all the different punishments that would happen if she did anything wrong: “If you took my teddy bear, then we would throw you in a pit and your job would be to climb out of the pit!”
“It’s not like [the parents] are spoiling [the children]. They’re spoiled. The damage has been done,” says this tutor, about some families. “It’s ‘Oh no, he’s got a sore leg so he can’t do sports.’ Or, ‘Oh, he wasn’t so good at music. He didn’t like the teacher so we’ve canceled,’” A teenager expelled from school might be punished with a ski trip to the Alps. A tutor attempting to administer discipline does so at their own risk. A mother may claim the tutor has free rein to take the student to task as needed, but when you do, says this tutor, “they go absolutely apeshit.”
On occasion, the parental abdication of responsibility for their child’s development can be so complete that the situation gets toxic. Oxford-educated Juliet Berner recalls tutoring a 12-year-old boy, whom we’ll call Michael, a middle child of a wealthy business leader based in Manhattan. He was intelligent, but had severe behavioral problems—flying off the handle at the smallest thing. She recalls a particularly frightening instance where the father came into the bedroom where she and the boy were working. He and Michael exchanged words, and the next thing, Michael threw a punch, and father and son were shouting and scuffling, trapping her in the room. Things got so difficult with Michael that his parents decided to send him to their second home out West—away from them and his two siblings—to live with Berner, a nanny, a housekeeper, and a few other staff members. He’d attend a day school and Berner would be his academic support, and also act in loco parentis. She began to make what felt like real progress with him. She even got him excited about the prospect of going to college one day and studying music. But all of that was undermined, she says, by the feeling of parental abandonment. As a result, says Berner, he became way more attached to her than was appropriate. “It would spring from him coming in and trying to hug me and being really tactile to throwing his books across the room. Both ends of it.” Though she never felt that her life was threatened, he became violent. Eventually, she grew resolved. “I thought, This is something I’m not ready for.”
One day, when the father came to town, he asked her to lunch to discuss Michael’s progress. She mustered the courage to tell him that she no longer felt equipped to handle the situation. The father became steely, and told her, “He needs you. You better not leave. If you leave, you’re abandoning him.” Berner was shocked by what sounded like emotional blackmail. Later, she phoned the head of the agency, who told her that she should say nothing more to the father, and that he would handle it. As it happened, there was another job awaiting her in Atlanta if she wanted it; he would get her on the next flight out.
As instructed, Berner returned to the house and secretly packed her things. The following morning, just after the father had taken Michael to school, a taxi arrived at 8:15 to bring her to the airport. The nanny and housekeeper came out wondering where she was going. She told them, “I’m so sorry it has to be this way. This is what I’ve been advised to do,” and slipped out the door. She rode to the airport, terrified that the father would see her in the taxi, anxious again when a fog moved in, temporarily suspending flights. When she finally landed in Atlanta, there were a series of furious messages from the father. “My biggest regret was leaving Michael,” says Berner. It’s a testament to her mettle that the experience did not deter her from working with students. Even today, with a new career as a doctor, she tutors on the side—out of a sheer love of knowledge. “When you’re doing some of the best literature, or studying an interesting bit of history, or doing cool stuff in Latin, it’s just a treat!” she says.
Other parents embrace full-time tutoring in a far more purposeful fashion. The tech elite in particular are motivated by a more philosophical rejection of traditional schooling, as obsolete to them as flip phones. New York–based entrepreneur Susan Danziger, who with her investor husband has homeschooled their three children, points out that “education, as framed today, came out of the Industrial Revolution where every kid is educated by manufacturing date.”
Caterina Fake, who cofounded the photo-sharing app Flickr and was the chairwoman of Etsy, has become something of a homeschooling pioneer among the start-up set in Silicon Valley. With an arresting certainty, she lays out all that she believes is wrong with traditional school—starting with the notion that one can interview a toddler. “‘Well, she is potty-trained and she doesn’t throw rocks. I don’t know what else you want from her,’” Fake says, by way of illustration. Fake believes there’s too much uniformity in most classrooms—of age, of race, and of socioeconomic status—which makes it a breeding ground for bullying. “Any difference stands out and difference is considered weird.” She has watched with dismay as her stepsons, who attend regular school, come home and say things like, “Girls are stupid.” “I’m like, Where’d you get that from?” Skeptics who ask her if she’s concerned about her child’s socialization, beware. “You tell me what flourishing social aspects of middle school she should be learning about.” And another thing? “Why should they go through emergency hide-under-the-desk, man-with-a-gun training? What is that?”
With those data points in mind, she set about educating her daughter, then in second grade, her way. She gathered a handful of like-minded Bay Area parents with kids of various ages. Through personal networking, she wrangled assorted accomplished young people to instruct their small group of kids, rotating from one house to another. “I think there’s just a desire to not settle for things that I know could be different, could be fixed, could be better. We’re unafraid of DIY in that regard. Unafraid of making it up and making our own jobs.” She believes that homeschooling is delivering far superior results. When her daughter briefly returned to regular school as an experiment, she had sailed past them in math, Fake reports. “The dirty little secret of school is actually that you can pretty much learn everything you need to learn in an hour, two hours,” she says.
True believers also tout that instruction can be highly tailored to the child’s personal interests—which translates to putting the child in charge of his own instruction. When Peter Wenger, the youngest of Danziger’s children, expressed an interest in cooking, his parents hired a number of chefs to do a “deep dive” on his passion, while other tutors shored up basic academics. A couple years later, his interests shifted to fashion design. The search for a tutor landed on a French-British graduate of Central Saint Martin’s who had just started a menswear line. Young Wenger vetted her himself. “When you’re talking about music or cooking or fashion, I’ve always sought people who are not teachers in the field—rather, just in the field,” says Wenger, at home in his parents’ Chelsea townhouse, before the pandemic, wearing tight jeans and in bare feet. At age 18, he’s now on his fifth collection. For Wenger and his siblings, homeschooling hasn’t been a handicap in the college game. Wenger will be attending Cornell in the fall. His siblings attend Wesleyan and UPenn.
As for Wenger’s social life, she says that his needs are being met, even if it’s a bit ad hoc. There’s a community of other homeschooling families in Manhattan; before the pandemic, many of them would meet up at the Wenger–Danziger house every Friday night to hang. There’s even a prom for New York City’s homeschooled. Wenger’s closest friends have all been tutored; his best friend is 24. Does he ever wonder what it would be like to be part of a traditional school community? “Absolutely,” he says. “[But] every time I had that thought, my second thought would always be, How much time can you commit to fashion at that point? How much freedom are you giving up? But of course, everyone thinks, What if?”
Not every kid is as sanguine as Wenger. Some bespoke-tutored kids may never shake the feeling of their own specialness. Jane Heir worked with a 13-year-old whose mother had taken her out of school because she was “a genius.” Except “she absolutely was not. I don’t know where that idea came from.” During one session, they went over material that the tutor had learned at age 11, and the girl had a meltdown because it was too hard. “All you’ve got is this belief to cling onto that you’re special. She was also emotionally incredibly immature. No life experience. No knowledge. She found it impossible to make friends. She’s the classic case of someone who’s going to break down the minute they go to Oxford or Harvard, because they’re not the cleverest person in the room and they don’t know how to talk to people.”
At the same time, the benefits that bespoke tutoring gives to certain children in certain circumstances can’t be overstated. Consider the case of a nine-year-old boy who, despite his privileged trappings, might have seemed poised for a tragic failure. His twin brother had recently died. He was agoraphobic; had obsessive-compulsive bouts in the morning so extreme that by the afternoon he was exhausted; and extreme paranoia about other people, even kids his own age. He had terrible headaches and confused words that a child his age should not be confusing. He rarely smiled—there was no reason to.
Into his life swept Madelaine Berlin. With warm brown eyes, a wide smile, and exceptionally crisp diction, she brings to mind an adult Hermione Granger. Folded into an armchair in her modest childhood home in Surrey, England, where she’s staying with her 100-year-old grandfather, she emotionally recalls her approach with the boy. “I was adamant that things swing into action pretty quickly,” she says. She started with his strengths. Wildly gifted creatively, the boy had an incredible eye for visualization. For six weeks before doing any academics, they built Meccano models (a kind of British Lego), as a way to build some calmness and structure between them, both literally and figuratively. Seeing that he needed help beyond academics, she researched and brought on a neurologist and an occupational therapist. “When you’re the only person in someone’s life from an educational point of view…if you’re not going to seek advice or connect the family with people to help, then nobody will.”
She worked with the boy over two years, in four of the family’s six homes, with full, unwavering purpose. As she explains, “You create a world for somebody from within which they can build their trust, build their confidence, and you never give up. You’re always there and you don’t give up like other schools might have done and you don’t give up like other nannies might have done, and you don’t give up like mom or dad might have done many, many times.” Now, two years later, he’s a different child. He was accepted into five independent schools, three of them the very top schools in England; he will be attending one in September. “And he’s smiling.”
There are many more such stories. A couple in Dubai, whose son was chronically disrespectful, felt hopeless before Berlin walked into their lives. “She earned his respect,” says the boy’s mother. “She helped us unravel and deal with my son. Collectively, with her help, we pulled off a miracle with him.” A teenage boy agonizing over his closeted sexuality found in his tutor, who was Harker, the loving mentor he needed. One day, during a lesson, he came out to her, bursting into tears. She talked him through coming out to his parents. “I got a little emotional too,” Harker recalls.
Such inspiring transformations occur even in ways parents never intended. Jane Heir worked for a family, headed by a mother whom she compares to Margaret Beaufort in the Wars of the Roses, “wherein she wasn’t the king but she was able to manipulate that staff, her court.” She and her husband were both rabid right-wing Tories, playing up, in an Anglo-conservative way, their devotion to the Anglican Church. And they were dead set on what the future would hold for their 16-year-old daughter—they’d taken her out of school to be a ballerina. The girl was less sure, however. When the dark ballet movie Black Swan came out, the daughter was desperate to see it. The mother was aghast and forbade it: “It’s all about psychosis, it’s all about perversions!”
As part of her tutelage of the girl, the tutor was intent on giving the girl her own agency in life. Like gumptious Maria urging Captain von Trapp to let his children make music, Jane Heir stepped in on the girl’s behalf. “Have you seen Black Swan?” she asked the mother. “Because I have and it’s not that exciting. It’s just a bit of a horror thriller with some edgy twists. But ultimately, it’s not going to break this child. It would do her a world of good. Transgress!” The mother could not be moved.
It seemed to the tutor that they’d come to a deeper impasse, and she announced that their arrangement was over. At which point the mother came to grips with reality. The girl ended up seeing Black Swan and lived to tell. Then she passed her A-levels, went back to high school, and ended up at an Ivy League, studying history. She now works at a nonprofit, has liberal views, and is not a ballerina, reports her tutor. “I’m quite proud of her.”
This story has been updated.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled the surname of the student Peter Wenger.
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