Benjamin Lucas, an experienced private tutor and educator, brings a wealth of insight from years of teaching at some of Europe’s most prestigious boarding schools.
Born in Newcastle and raised in Manchester, Benjamin attended a local grammar school before pursuing a dual passion for academics and sports as a scholar at Durham University. During his teenage years, he represented England at the national level and captained one of the most successful lacrosse teams outside North America.
After university and a year abroad studying languages, Benjamin embarked on a rigorous school-based teacher training program in former mining towns and economically disadvantaged communities. This challenging experience nearly derailed his journey but ultimately solidified his commitment to education. Over the past decade, Benjamin has taught languages, humanities, ethics, sports, and even practical "common sense" at elite European boarding schools. With an unrelenting drive to improve his craft, he views teaching as a noble vocation, continually refining his methods and philosophies.
In this interview, we explore the state of modern education, Benjamin's rich family heritage of educators, and the hurdles of breaking free from traditional educational models.
Benjamin shares his alternative approach to education, focusing on personalized learning, the centrality of the family, and the importance of spirituality and discipline. He examines and contrasts various educational philosophies, including Montessori, Waldorf, and public school systems, while emphasizing the critical role of parents in nurturing a child's intellectual and moral development.
In addition, Benjamin provides actionable advice for parents looking to enhance their children’s education—through curated reading, personalized tutoring, and cultivating a lifelong love of learning. This thought-provoking conversation offers valuable insights into innovative educational practices and serves as a guide for those passionate about shaping the future of learning.
Time Stamps / Chapters
00:29 Introduction and Background
01:12 Generational Influence in Education
02:41 Dissident Perspective on Education
03:42 Challenges in Modern Education
04:53 Private Tutoring and Its Value
06:29 Experience at Elite Boarding Schools
16:04 Parental Role in Education
27:13 Balancing Discipline, Creativity, Learning
43:31 Final Thoughts and Recommendations
Highlights and Quotes of Interest
Challenges in Modern Education
So I think we're currently in the West facing the the outcome, the consequences of possibly as much as 100, 200 years of targeted and deliberate effort to undermine the liberty that education can bring the liberty to the mind and eventually to the body and to the spirit and what has ended up happening through various crises, wars and government intervention and planning is a huge overreach from the state all over the West into what previously was mostly a contract between parents and a teacher. And there've been problems. There've been mistakes with that. There've been errors for improvement, but we now have an entire society in America and England that almost can't conceive in its imagination of free
On the Dissident Perspective
The dissident perspective, I think it starts with what you do with your own words, own actions, your own family.
What are you as an individual doing there? And I've chosen to try and build the future as best I can by having some children and that's very hard and it's very counter cultural at the moment But I truly believe in it that extends to my vision for education as well
On The Role of the Parent
A mum with mail order curriculum absolutely wipes the floor with most schools, even the top ones, and it's because there's so much going on in that learning process that a mother brings that a hireling like me cannot and will never be able to, and increasingly with safeguarding, you're not even allowed to even have a an appropriate relationship with children.
Bench Marks for Systems
There are two litmus tests, two yardsticks that come to mind. For a school or an education program, the first is this: Can it take the smallest, most overlooked individual—someone like Tiny Tim, someone who seems irrelevant, insignificant, and without visible potential—and make that flower bloom?
Can it nurture that seed and help it grow into something truly remarkable? If it can, that’s fantastic. It means the program is individual-focused, not limited by what’s immediately visible. It values and loves the individual for where they are and trusts in the tremendous invisible potential each person holds.
The second test is whether it can replicate that for every level of society. As you put it, does it go beyond maintaining the country club environment or the class structure? This is crucial. Is it focused on fostering learning, progress, and discovery for every individual in a way that enables them to break free from societal constraints if they choose?
A good education should equip them with the mindset, ability, intelligence, and true education to go wherever they want in life.
Interview
Opening
Benjamin: It's a bit like the doors of the prison are wide open and the prisoners just can't imagine what life would be like outside without the bells and the guards and the food on trays, the taste of nothing. It's an interesting time to be an educator. It's certainly very difficult to try and break out of the system.
Introduction and Background
Leafbox: So, Benjamin before we start, I just wanted to thank you again. I have a young daughter. She's six. My sister has her own school in South America. And she runs a Montessori school. I went to international schools similar and maybe somewhat different to the schools that you were teaching in, these boarding schools. So I wanted to know a little bit about maybe that background, and you made it seem like you have a dissident perspective on education. I think that's something that we could explore, and also some of the Christian, I'm not a Christian, but I appreciate a spiritual basis in education. So these are all angles that we can explore. And maybe before we start, Benjamin, why don't you tell us about where you are and how you came to education?
Benjamin: Okay.
Generational Influence in Education
Benjamin: My, my background is probably five, six generations. of educators and teachers which I found out recently. And I don't know whether that sort of thing is passed on hereditary, genetically, but I think the skills of pedagogy and the interest in teaching and the culture that a good teacher brings about cannot escape the family.
I've got grandparents, great grandparents, great grandparents, great grandparents, and possibly even great grandparents, who were all heavily involved in education and teaching. Often to those that were orphans such as the British army schools to Sunday schools and in deprived areas of the North of England.
Back when Sunday schools and it was quite a rigorous curriculum. And primary schools, secondary schools. One of my ancestors was a headmaster of a school in the Midlands and was very well regarded for that. And introduced a lot of the good aspects of a top private school to a state school, such as a prefect system.
And so for me, it was either the Royal Marines or the teaching profession. And I met a lovely lady who's now my wife. And I couldn't really see myself at that time second to last year of university, once it mattered, going into the army, into the Royal Marines. I'm sure it'd have been great.
I loved it. I'd have been pretty good at it.
Dissident Perspective on Education
Benjamin: But as it is, I went down a different route of quiet and invisible leadership in terms of being a father we now have four children, so I'm 30 years, I was 30 years old with four children it's pretty rare in England these days, but in terms of your comment about dissident perspective, I think it starts with what you do with your own words, own actions, your own family.
What are you as an individual doing there? And I've chosen to try and build the future as best I can by having some children and that's very hard and it's very counter cultural at the moment But I truly believe in it that extends to my vision for education as well I do come from a Christian background.
That's how I live my life as a group with a Christian worldview and I think whilst there's an important role for spirituality, I don't think anybody could ignore or neglect the idea that a child that's educated in a particular way is going to go on and have an impact with that worldview.
Benjamin: So I think we're currently in the West facing the the outcome, the consequences of possibly as much as 100, 200 years of targeted and deliberate effort by a group of people to undermine the liberty that education can bring the liberty to the mind and eventually to the body and to the spirit and what has ended up happening through various crises, wars and government intervention and planning is a huge overreach from the state all over the West into what previously was mostly a contract between parents and a teacher. And there've been problems. There've been mistakes with that. There've been errors for improvement, but we now have an entire society in America and England that almost can't conceive in its imagination of freedom that would seem too risky.
It's a bit like the doors of the prison are wide open and the prisoners just can't imagine what life would be like outside without the bells and the guards and the food on trays, the taste of nothing. It's an interesting time to be an educator. It's certainly very difficult to try and break out of the system.
Private Tutoring and Its Value
Benjamin: My wife and I have been very fortunate that I've been able to move into private tutoring private tutoring, either online or in person I'm currently trying to build. An in person tutoring network here in Manchester in the Northwest South Manchester and Cheshire were based because it's a much more rigorous in person and valued service by parents as opposed to online tutoring.
Online tutoring, in theory, you can provide an expert, but there's a lot of charlatans out there. There's a lot of agencies that want to make a good book from parent. And I think the relationship with the child, with the student of whatever age. is never going to be built into the same depth as in person tutoring.
In person tutoring is, as far as I'm concerned, the really the only option that the parents should be considering unless they know what they're getting and they're paying a decent and fair price for that hourly online tuition. So even though I'm currently engaging in it, I try and provide the best service I can.
That's not, there's not an area of education where I want to stay. I think education needs definitely to make, not an exclusive switch, but it needs to be be much more analog, be much more offline. And so for those of us, I would not, describe myself as right on the right, but I would describe myself as a dissident.
There's areas where the right would disagree with me and the left wouldn't and vice versa. And I would say that's because I'm trying to pursue truth as I understand it represented by God's word and his law. That's perhaps a conversation for another time.
Experience at Elite Boarding Schools
Benjamin: As far as the dissident perspective, the last year I was at a school called
You will need to blur that bit out. But it's the most expensive boarding school in the world over in . And it was very disappointing experience. It was a very damaging experience to my morale as a teacher. And It helped give me that final swift kick to leave the nest of schooling and of classroom teaching as the means of fulfilling my calling as a teacher and wanting to help build free men and women.
Leafbox: What was that environment like? I have no idea. This is a boarding school. So who are the students going there? Are these the sons of North Korean dictators?
Benjamin: Yes. Yes, that and sons and daughters of some of the most. Lovely people, you can imagine, who have lots of wealth, they do exist, very lovely, kind people.
But most of them were coming from countries with enormous wealth disparities, like Russia, Azerbaijan, China. Again, some of them have probably made their money as fairly as they could in that environment. But the children have inherited a sort of mindset of the nouveau riche.
And the way I try and describe it is that they are not luxury in the sense of quality and standards and class and dignity. They are extremely high end consumers. So they're not really producers. They're not, they are in no way in no means individuals that I would want my children to emulate, they have the means to go and buy, I don't know, they get 10,000 euros every week for pocket money.
You can do a lot with that, right? But it can also cripple you and it can really damage your ability to do anything really as a human being, to be creative, to adapt to problems. The school fair, I remember a moment famously where we were instructed as. I helped out with a bit of the sports program and we were instructed not to arrange fixtures with other schools, not even to bother.
The school would just reject them out of hand because there couldn't be any. risk that the students would lose. And so that mindset carried itself over into every area of school life. If I'm not hard ass, I'm not a grumpy teacher by any means, but I have standards, I've rigged, I expect rigor in my classroom for my language teaching and my ethics classes, which I was teaching at [redacted].
And I had maybe four or five kids go straight to management after a few lessons. It's too hard, sir. It's too hard. I don't want to be in this class anymore. I don't enjoy it. And then there would begin a kind of Gestapo like investigation into my teaching and into my into my behavior in the class, because even though I wasn't being assessed by teachers, and I was, my teaching was perhaps looked at for five minutes across the entire year if a student complained a little bit like a customer.
Or a guest in a hotel, top five star luxury hotel then it can't be the guests fault can it? It's got to be the staff. And so I just ended up getting sick of that and very just checked out really. The marketing and the mission and the message of that school is radically different to what they end up providing on the ground, which is essentially a, an, a US college and British university shuttle system.
So an exam factory. None of the heady ideals and values that are very easy to talk about, but really quite tricky to implement consistently such as entrepreneurialism, being a very innovative startup sort of school. All of this requires taking on an appropriate level of risk and being okay with failure.
And there, there is a class of the rich that is very allergic to that. And I think those individuals that belong to the super wealthy within two, three generations, their families are passed through that revolving door of the wealthy that top 1%, top 0. 5 percent doesn't, they don't stay the same except in countries where it's very unfair and where the economy is not free then it's possible that we, in a place like Russia you really are stuck with kind of a new equivalent of the aristocracy through these oligarchs.
Leafbox: Benjamin, how were you recruited into the system of elite high schools and elite boarding schools?
Benjamin: I'm afraid in a very boring way, just through a teacher, just do an ad on a teach web teacher. They are not looking for elite people. That's the truth. The truly elite people, but it's a bit like, if you compare politics from maybe 220 years ago in the UK, where you have individuals like Pitt the Younger and and others, they really were the most brightest and impressive people of that day, whereas today we've just got clowns and a circus show.
Equally, the truly expert, truly impressive teachers are nowhere to be seen. They're either laboring under pressure in whichever school that they're at, and every school has maybe got two or three truly excellent teachers, but across the board, the teaching profession is not designed to, you have to understand Robert it's not designed to bring out exceptional learning.
It's designed to bring out behavior management. It's designed to bring out organization, good scheduling compliance. And cooperation and with the scheme of work and teaching, on time and making sure that everything's covered. It's very rare to come across somebody that, that instinctively, like me, breaks that, that programming.
To me at the beginning, it was because it was just instinct. I knew there was something wrong, smell the rat, but I didn't quite know what it was, but I just didn't, I just couldn't cooperate with the system in that way. And so it's quite odd that you come across teachers such as myself. Who has been in the system and from the get go has basically been resisting it.
It's quite hard to do. It's very demoralizing. It takes its toll. And consequently I've left the classroom. I've left schools maybe for the foreseeable future. And I'm working on in person tutoring instead. There are top elite schools in the U S and England, I would say, I'd say there aren't any truly elite schools in because the clientele that they're aiming for their greatest virtue and it truly simply is the bank account. And their financial assets, that's it. So you're not, they're not compatible really with truly elite education. They come in and they're the kind of people that think that luxury is a price tag.
And I would disagree. I would say luxury and elite do cost something. But there's a lot more to a luxury watch or luxury education or a look luxury clothing than just the price tag. If you get a handcrafted Morgan car or still handmade in Malvern in England, where you get a a Porsche.
There are certain cars like Bentleys, Rolls Royces, they are expensive, but there's also a lot more to them than just being expensive and just being a price tag. So I'd say this, I'd say the elite teachers are maybe at places like Eaton Harrow, places that are so robust and so anti fragile that, The sorts of teachers that go there can stay there and can can contribute to perhaps a degraded and weaker vision today than it used to be, but a place like Winchester, extremely potent vision of education and if you've got a system where teachers are sticking around for 20, 30 years, which is not uncommon at these places.
They give a cushy deal. It's a good place to stick around if you can. You obviously get the negative there that teachers just stick around and they don't do a good job and they're not inclined to, they've got tenure, they don't try and improve what they offer. But I'd say there's maybe a few places, but I think institutions ultimately across the West have collapsed, Robert.
And finding good teachers is tricky because the system that is now the official pathway to becoming one. is not prioritizing learning and the people. So the elite education, the luxury education, I would argue is as it's always been provided by deliberate thoughtful parents who are putting together a pathway for their children at the high end that involves mostly private one to one and small group seminar tutoring in person with, expert tutors that's just unbeatable.
One of the goals that I've got at the moment is to try and figure out a way to democratize that process to help create guides for parents at the lower end of the salary scale, who would like that for their children, who would like to have children in the next generation that are truly excellent human beings, very cultured, very educated across the board.
And trying to find a way to, to make that level accessible to that stubborn and very hopeful minority of people.
I'm sorry if that's pessimistic.
Leafbox: No. It's not pessimistic at all.
There's so many questions to start with.
Parental Role in Education
Leafbox: Nurture versus nature, how important do you think, when to start this process?
My daughter right now goes to a Waldorf school, particularly because I live here in Hawaii and there's more of a tiger style education model with the Asian influence.
Benjamin: That can be very toxic.
Leafbox: Yeah. So I'm not interested in that for now. The age that my daughter is. And we also tried to supplement her. She goes to a Japanese language school. My partner is Tahitian French, so we are very multilingual. So I'm always trying to create choose some basis for the Waldorf has lots of excellent elements. My sister runs a Montessori school that has other strong elements. The Japanese education system has very great things in it as well.
We're building our own curricula through different elements.
Benjamin: And Robert, this is where I'd love to ask you a question. What would be the good ingredients from all of those that you've mentioned?
Leafbox: Starting with Montessori is very good for children who are very self-driven.
So for kids it's excellent at building entrepreneurial kind of mindset for people who are very self-driven. For my sister's school, for instance, it's very good for boys, tends to be for boys who don't maybe excel and group dynamics and Montessori type education can be very good for early education as well. And then Waldorf is incredible at connecting. If when I watch My daughter's classroom, there's only eight kids in her room and they have such a wonderful mixed, there's no technology in terms of computers or anything like that. It's all one on one learning with one teacher who's there all day and has such a loving, caring And I actually like some of the philosophy of Steiner and his anthroposophical, it's a very large emotional learning framework, which I think is positive and that spiritual element and bringing things to the earth and the way they learn through traditional means instead of gadgets.
Here in Hawaii, at least in the U. S., they're obsessed with iPads. Learning the iPads. My daughter, there's not a single iPad in her life. It's handwriting. Math is through, physical manipulation. Her Japanese school where she does Japanese, it's all paper. It's, there is a little bit of learning in the Japanese education system, but that has more to do with the language.
They have, Kanji and calligraphy and games. Yes. So these are excellent practices. And I would say that environment's a little tougher for her in the sense that they have homework, whereas Waldorf tends not to have homework, right? But then if I compare it to the public school system, I would agree with you that the public school system, at least my interaction with it, especially during the COVID period.
Debacle. Yeah, it was more focused on the teacher's unions and some of the yeah, and I have a friend who's a he used to be a professor at the University of Hawaii, and he had two kids who are older, 20, 25, who went through the elite schools of Hawaii. One is called Punahou and the other one's the Iolani.
Punahou maybe you know, is where President Obama went to school. It's a very prestigious it's not a boarding school. It's an American style prep school and okay. Very elite, and it has lots of great elements, but it's more of a country club environment, maintaining a class structure, but I would agree with those schools, they don't necessarily instill deep desire for learning, or a deep desire for the individual child's intentions and desires.
Benjamin: That for me is one of the yardsticks. There's two litmus tests, two yardsticks that come to mind when you say that. For a school, for a, an education program, it's, can it take the smallest, most invisible, most overlooked individual, tiny Tim, can it take someone that is to, to the world's eyes, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant, insignificant, and without potential, can it take that individual and make that flower bloom?
Make that seed grow into something really impressive. Can it do that? And if it can, fantastic. It's individual focused and it's not looking at the potential that's visible right now, it's able to bring that out as a value and a love and a compassion for the individual, wherever they're at.
And it trusts that each individual bring, there's a tremendous amount of invisible potential that can be tapped into. And the second is really. Can it replicate that for every level of society? It's a very good phrase that you used there describing the country club environment, maintaining the class structure.
That's the other litmus test for me. Is it focused on the learning, the progress, the discovery of each individual such that if they want, they could break the class structure. They could go wherever they want in society. You've given them that potential, that ability that mindset and that, that intelligence, that education really, truly.
Whereas a lot of these schools, the next generation often is less impressive than the former because their aim isn't to really excel. It's to consolidate, hold the fort, not shake the boat, mindset. Make sure that the dividend account doesn't go down. And so gradually over time, I personally, from my perspective, as, as soon as a family gets rich and it starts to acquire this mindset mentality.
It's almost like the clock starts ticking on how long that wealth is going to be with that family because each successive generation either, either becomes fearful and very conservative and doesn't want to take risks. There's no risk taking anywhere. And, or it becomes very decadent.
And so it, it doesn't even have a concept of how to go and create this wealth. Once it's gone. Okay. They, the family owns an enormous corporation and that doesn't look like it's going to disappear anytime soon. So we can just have razy, ridiculous parties and an extravagant wealth show displays of wealth.
That's fine. Okay. Whatever. When you actually meet them as individuals, they're very unimpressive. And so there's this entire structure around them that everything is designed to conserve. There's no expansion. There's no real generosity in sharing and spreading of that wealth to grow more, to go and build more.
And I think for that to happen, you have to have very special, unique individuals who have been trained and read and educated and taught in such a way as to to understand that wealth, for example is held in an open hand. It's yours. You, it belongs to you, use it well. But he, who gives the more he gives the more he had.
There's a little phrase I often tell my kids when they ask about money is, there was a man, they thought him mad, the more he gave, the more he had, the generosity is almost the key to continuing wealth and continuing success across generations, not by becoming a smaug, like in the Hobbit and hoarding it but actually by finding ways to to share and to spread it and to enable other people to come on in their individual growth, but every education philosophy and system that I've come across in the mainstream denigrates the individual.
It's not interested in lifting up the individual and helping them grow and partly because that's a philosophical perspective, but also because it's really hard, my, my tutoring company is called Artisan Tuition and it's all offline at the moment. There's not a website just yet, but, the idea being that the artisan, he crafts, he's a craftsman, he takes craft and care over his work.
And that every individual that you come across requires that, that care and attention. Education I'm really persuaded, Robert, education just can't be mass produced anymore. Maybe the resources can, but the actual process of learning and helping bring something around, about to a child is intensely personal.
And, humans aren't going to change really dramatically. I doubt that. I resonate with what you say about the obsession with tech . And someone said, Oh, what were they like, asking probing questions as if I was teaching, the next generation of Bond super villains.
And they're just addicted to TikTok the same as anyone else, they are just suffering even more because they're able to consume more.
Leafbox: Maybe going back to your ideal model then, what should parents I mean there's a lot of stress parents have, but if someone is interested in building this kind of individualized model, what should they do?
What should parents of all means do? From the, ultra wealthy to the lower class person, what can they do? How can they accelerate that spark in their child's life?
Benjamin: Certainly what comes to mind with the working classes in England was what made an enormous change to them from the reading and research that I've done was just access to public libraries back when they weren't filled with filth and nonsense, but I would say books, really the offline element is absolutely key.
There is truly something that goes on far deeper than just interpretation of symbols on a page as text when you're reading and especially when you're reading in a relaxed manner, something that you find very interesting, Charlotte Mason a British educator from the Victorian era. She used to talk about living books.
That idea that you're reading a book that comes alive for you, such that you don't want to put it down. It's come alive. You want to stay in the story. And, I would say hit the books wherever you can find a good reading list be it the great books or really whatever. If you've got the internet at your fingertips and chat GPT and Reddit forums and Mumsnet or whatever it is a good reading list is readily available and avoid being perfectionist, go one book at a time.
If you need to, or five books, stay five books ahead of your kids. It takes time to read a book because. Unlike a machine, the brain and children, they are organic and organic systems. They just simply work differently to machines and that's perfectly okay. So I would say that's another mindset shift is if you have been schooled yourself.
It's going to take some time to break that conditioning and to break that that, that mindset and that position really in your perspective towards other human beings. It's like a fish swimming in a fishbowl. You don't realize you're in water. You don't realize the toxic mindset that you might have towards a human being in terms of expectations and in terms of how you how you do some, how you do things when theory meets practice how are you actually going to apply your principles?
What are the other perhaps unconscious principles that you have towards learning and towards the learner? That aren't good, that aren't positive. And one of them Is this child a robot or is this child an organic system? It's far more than an organic system, but it's certainly not a robot, not a machine.
Balancing Discipline and Creativity
Benjamin: And that, affects honestly everything, I'm a big believer in discipline. I'm a big believer in rigor. I think homework is perhaps the wrong word for that. But I think that there shouldn't be a period of the day where learning stops for children. If they find the stuff at school really boring, then maybe don't force them to do that.
That for me is where Waldorf and Montessori really fall down is the students, every student that I've met that's come out of those systems has not been as disciplined and rigorous as I would like, and I would expect from my own children. And so it it's trying to find that balance between helping, your children simply push on and do things that they really don't want to do.
If you're, you as a parent, you're wise, you're more mature you can see the world from a mile high view perhaps than they can. Find those things. I beg you as a parent, find those things. That you know are going to bring about really healthy, positive, lasting change for your children.
Especially if they are really unpleasant, uncomfortable things that the children have to do and have to keep at until they succeed. The character and the virtue of such activities doesn't outweigh. The great books and the self learning but it's a necessary string to accompany that your children have to be able to to push on with discipline and self control that, that is absolutely essential to producing a human being that can go on and win the world and build stuff.
So that's almost sitting with the journal and a coffee, getting up perhaps 30 minutes earlier than the rest of the family. And just having a think, thinking what are the virtues and the characters that I want in my children at 18, at 15. It used to be, I'm not saying this was across the board, by any means, but in the past children have been capable and responsible for far more things than we think of them capable of today.
13, 14, 15 year olds, captaining ships in the Royal Navy really remarkable young people coming through at far earlier ages than we would expect. And I would suggest to parents that another principle is to perhaps try and think of ways to have more appropriate fences for age than society thinks that maybe your 11, 12, 13 year old is far more capable.
Than what you think in a particular area. and find ways as a family to allow that to happen. I'm firmly persuaded, that the family is the bedrock of society. It's the most important of the three between the church, the state and the family. It's where everything happens on a local level, really.
And the other two build upon it. And if we neglect that, if we're basically just a TV family living in a dormitory suburb and we never see one another, then everything that I say is irrelevant and pointless and you shouldn't even attempt it. This is, a way of life and about family culture and about a mother and a father, especially the father, taking the time to plot out loose principle based.
Curriculum for his family and for his children, plotting out a journey for their development that those would be broad brush strokes that I would give at the time. I love that you mentioned the Japanese schooling, maybe teach them if you can native Hawaiian as well. And bring about another language.
Obviously they speak French through the mother. Yeah, the Waldorf, they teach a Hawaiian as well.
Leafbox: So it's mandatory. Yeah.
Benjamin: So that's very good.
Languages and culture are really important. And like primarily languages and humanities teacher and I think having that ability to just to step across cultures through languages is a wonderful gift for children to have.
Leafbox: I was going to ask, yeah, if you're familiar with the unschooling philosophy, I think it came, it's almost like you're advocating for kind of an unschooling, homeschooling, self guided model with tutors. Is that kind of what I'm summarizing as your model in a way?
Benjamin: I'm privileged to be able to speak to you, Robert, but part of the development for me through conversations like these, as I talk about it and people ask questions and I ask them questions, the vision starts to a bit more meat's put on the bones, so to speak. Probably, to be honest, yes, probably that, that sort of unschooling, but at the same time, with an expectation, there are just some things that you have to know.
And you have to know them in your time at a time that that works for you. But I don't think that children. I don't know of any good educator. One of my main models is Charlotte Mason. Yeah. I don't know of any good educators that entirely leave the process of learning up to the child. Because certainly in the early years they don't instinctively push towards discipline and rigor.
And I think the public schools have taken discipline and rigor to really unpleasant lows. They've made learning about duty and made it a chore. And it should be pleasurable. There should be pleasure in the exertion of the mind. Charlotte Mason used to start with children for maybe three minutes a day, right at the beginning.
Only three minutes, three minutes in maybe the morning, possibly with certain children, the entire day of truly focused learning. And the rest of it was play. The rest of it was exploration. The rest of it was character and morals through the playground, through the garden. She used to run like a cottage school.
And so her children, there'd be a lot of play and a lot of discovery. And then that three minutes would progressively build up to maybe five minutes and then ten minutes. And Robert, you sound like you've got experience of the public school system. If I asked you, do you think any of those children in that day have done 10 minutes of truly focused deep learning in that one day?
What would you say?
Leafbox: I think traditionally there was tracked schools. So for instance, in Chile, there's the, probably the best school is Instituto Nacional, which is like the national public school. And they basically track. The smartest gifted children in that school. They're definitely working hard and they have the best teachers.
And that's like the Eaton of Chile that you can get to go there. And it's so prestigious and it's free and it has people from the elite classes and people found in the South of Chile who are poor. And I would say that school they're doing, it's like a Caltech environment. They're just self driven.
There's nothing you really need to do. These kids are, IQs 130 and above. The hardware's already there. The software can be easily installed. At other schools, like you said, it could become just a management of the lowest denominator in the class. Yeah, attention disorders and different parenting styles and disruptions and whatever's happening at the family blends into the classroom environment.
Benjamin: Absolutely. Absolutely. And ultimately, the certainly my experience with the public schools and really also with many of these top end private schools is that because learning isn't the main focus of the school, no matter what they say. Learning can't be controlled, it can't, often can't be measured linearly.
Because that's the case, most students aren't really actually learning. They might be doing something, they might be busy, but they're not actually learning. Learning is something that you lay down forever, and that you take with you, and often it's a, bit of trial and error, trying to figure it out, if you've ever taught your children phonics teaching my eldest two to read.
And at times it's a little bit strenuous, it's a little bit, Oh, you're going to pick yourself up, son from your failure, you've got that wrong. We need to do it again until you get it right. And so that's where the discipline and the rigor for me comes in is make sure that you're doing the right thing, make sure you're doing something that's worthwhile, and then really press it up and have a vision for why you're doing it so that when the going gets tough, it's not just the teachers, beat me over the head with a metaphorical ruler of just unforgiving and strict expectations. But, this is something worth doing and therefore I can push on and make the most of a strenuous and difficult experience. That for me that the idea of discipline. Do your children come to you as a mother and a father when you call?
For my wife and I, that's just a given. Now, our children are very obedient, and we've trained them in that. But for most parents, at least in the UK, that would be an absolute, we'd get left out of the room. The idea that a parent would do what that a child would do what the parent says.
That fundamentally is the core of the relationship between a parent and a child is do as I ask, please. I know better and I love you and I want the best for you. And if you follow my commands and you follow what I instruct, then, things will go well for you because you'll be walking a good path in those early years.
I appreciate not every parent necessarily agrees with that, but I've been a teacher for over a decade now. And in my experience, those parents that have loving discipline obviously has to be loving with the parents. And conversely, those parents that have had no discipline, that it's been freedom and liberty not quite liberty, but libertinism, do what you want, really, and do how you feel, as the bedrock and foundation of education.
They have had consistently radically different outcomes, and the children in the latter example never meet their potential.
Leafbox: So how, this, yeah, we could have a whole conversation just on discipline, but I love your message of the love behind the, strength of the order, right? You're saying in a beautiful way that, I love you son, therefore follow my, my commands, because this is the best for you.
That's a good summary for what people can take away with that. For people who do have children in public school, how can the add on to their children's education? What should they do? Add tutor? Do you think, maybe I'm curious what you think about the tiger mom style where they do three, four hours every night, repeating heavy practice of things.
Benjamin: I think you're dead set on killing your kids, to be honest, and killing the creativity. They'll probably be very capable and very able to do things, but there's a lot of soft skills and a lot of a lot of. Invisible skills that can't be planned into being like creativity, like entrepreneurialism, like kindness and compassion and empathy.
Like hard work and diligence, all of these things, they are transformed. Into not just potential but fuel and energy for a student later in life when it is intrinsic and when the student themselves decides to walk the path to acquiring them, right? If a student is choosing to be kind instead of being told to be kind when a student is kind.
Choosing to go out and find and identify the needs of his or her neighbors and meet them. That's practice of entrepreneurialism. The lemonade stand, if my neighbors are thirsty, maybe I shouldn't do a stand. Maybe I should actually go to them and sell it one to one. That would meet the needs more.
And then the police aren't going to arrest me and give me a charge. For, making money on the sidewalk. Then all of a sudden you've got, You've got a wonderful experience as a teacher where you're in some ways you're trying to keep up, you're trying to put fences and guidelines in to help them continue on the good path rather than trying to dictate where they go.
The example I always, everyone's heard the phrase, can't take a horse to water. You can take a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. Have you heard that phrase?
Leafbox: Of course, yes.
Benjamin: Yeah, everyone's heard it. My, my counter is well you can take, what about thirsty camel?
You've got a different problem then. It's that it's going to drink the oasis dry. So what do you do? We need to find more water. We need to plant more trees. We need to terraform that entire area to make sure that a thirsty camel can drink water and not make my point, the idea is that if you've got a child that is extremely enthusiastic about something and every parent just through spending time with them should be able to pick that up going into different environments, trying out different museums, something like that, getting different toys that aren't, technological or rather are technological, but perhaps aren't digital things that, that, Distinction should be made that a technological toy, Lego is quite technological, K'nex or Meccano like a kit car.
That's something that I'd like to build with my son when he's about 10 or 11 is buy these kind of build your own race car sort of kits. They're about 25, 000 pounds, but you basically got a working road worthy car at the end of it. And I think that would be wonderful little project to have with him.
My other daughter, one of my daughters is just a dancer. She just dances down the street. And I'd like to find her ballet and immerse myself into the world of dance as a father of girls. But to your original question, what can parents be doing? I would say yes, find a good tutor and don't be afraid to look in quite unorthodox and unconventional places.
If you're strapped for cash, find truly excellent university students or master's students. They're obviously going to be a lot cheaper. They're going to be incredibly grateful for the family relationship. You've probably got a babysitter there as well. They're not going to want as much money as say me or one of my colleagues in the tutoring world who's been doing this for years.
And often, particularly if they're incredibly, or a PhD student, they're you know, they're going to be there for a few years and they are truly experts and truly masters of or on the way to becoming masters of the subject. They should at the very least have a very solid grounding of the foundations and the basics and, often they're younger folk and they're away from home and and it's a win for everybody.
If there's an older person in the community who, they are rare, finding polymaths and experts and very knowledgeable people who also have the compassion and the patience for children. I think that's what people overlook is it's why mothers make such good parents.
A mum with mail order curriculum absolutely wipes the floor with most schools, even the top ones, and it's because there's so much going on in that learning process that a mother brings that a hireling like me cannot and will never be able to, and increasingly with safeguarding, you're not even allowed to even have a an appropriate relationship with children.
They really are just cogs and you're just, your job is to just make them spin. So I would say yes, definitely find a tutor and outside of a kind of direct determined curriculum that you or the local school have set for your child, those sessions with a tutor should really be a great opportunity. undirected, not unguided because the tutor will guide them. But it needs to be conversation based. It needs to be based around books and based around delight and enjoyment and curiosity and interest such that. Your child is coming away with treasures that he didn't know that they would have.
And so the personality and the character of a tutor is absolutely paramount. Has to be someone who is capable of loving and caring for another human being, especially a small one.
Leafbox: Benjamin. Could you talk a little bit more about the difference between how boys and girls learn and then what your experiences in how to..
Benjamin: Yeah, I've got two, three minutes left. I apologize. I didn't realize I was rambling. I thought I was trying to answer your question. But so the difference between boys and girls, I would say, is Enormous. They are. It's vast. And huge.
Leafbox: Should they learn together just based on the tutor, is the summary, right? And then what's the final message that parents can take away from this?
Final Thoughts and Recommendations
Leafbox: How important is their role maybe in that's the, I guess the message you're giving the parents role is the number one role in the child's education.
Benjamin: Based, I don't have the explicit answer to that, Robert, based on what I've said. If. If a parent is deliberate and full of good intent about building a pathway and later on in the child's life working with them, collaborating with them to brainstorm and plot ahead a learning pathway then every parent who can read and who has patience to pick up a book and figure out what their children are learning, Every parent has the capacity to teach up to, say, 13 and probably even beyond that if they've got more time and more interest and more patience to most of the time relearn things that had been passed on to them. Learning, the learning process is not technique. The learning process is good food prepared well. And there comes a point really where a parent needs to, I would say, think about what areas they could bring in other experts to supplement that and guide that, but not to replace them.
That's the key there is that the parent is absolutely you're absolutely fine bringing someone in who's perhaps got more expertise than you. I find science fascinating, but it's just not an area where I could really bring about much much learning. I could bring about wonder and delight but not much rigorous learning through conversation and through questioning.
For my children, that's something I'd be looking at. Finding ads in the newspaper, contact the university. These people aren't gonna come to you. So get out into the community, get out into your networks, and try and find either older people for a reasonable price if that's your salary band. Or find younger university folk, PhD students, as I mentioned, who are gonna be able to, come into your family, sit around the dinner table, go on walks with you and your kids and just talk about stuff. And spend time with your children, a lot of time with them, over a longer period of time, so start now. Find someone when they're, for when your children are six or seven. You want them to be there, ideally, until your children are 13, 14, 15.
You want that relationship to be, ultimately a friendship where that tutor comes in and, helps cultivate learning across years because as I've said, humans are organic. They need that cultivation, that laying down of good nutrition and good challenge for as long as possible.
And then get books get books and paperback, hardback, visit the library, be very discerning with what you find there. And so particularly a public library and make books an absolute hallmark of your child's. Upbringing. The last thing, which I forgot to mention earlier, Robert, which I would encourage all parents to do is get their children to start a learning diary or just a diary that includes every morning and every evening without fail, handwritten reflections and plans and thoughts on their learning and what's going on in their world and what they're recognizing, learning about what they've remembered, what they've noticed, all of that sort of thing can be as short or long as appropriate for your child.
But that is a very simple, very cheap. It's simply time. Time and discipline will save you a lot of money if you can incorporate them into your family culture. But that reflection is I would increasingly I'm coming to see is really the engine room of learning. It's that gentle remembering, recollection, recalling of information and thinking about it.
We use the phrase, I was just chewing on it. Precisely. Yeah. The information was being digested. And then comes the result. So those would be the the little gems that I've picked up so far.
Leafbox: Those are all great messages. Benjamin, for my own learning, those are all things that adults can incorporate as well in their own lifelong learning process.
Benjamin, how can people find you? What can they do to connect with you?
Benjamin: You can send me an email benlucas6 at gmail. com. So far I've got four young kids, but I'm trying to put together a website for my in person tuition. I'm sure there'll be a blog or something at some point, long form writing, but yeah, they can drop me an email at benlucas6 at gmail. com. If you're living locally in the UK sure we could figure out a meetup or if otherwise, maybe getting in touch with you and sending you messages.
I don't know. I'm not optimized for the SEO at the moment, Robert, I'm afraid.
Leafbox: Yeah, that's fine. It's fine. Anything else, Benjamin, you want to share? I know your time's valuable.
Benjamin: Just thank you for listening to this rambling, rambling young man from England. It's been a, it's been a pleasure to talk to you, Robert.
And thank you for your audience for being so patient as to listen.
Leafbox: Yeah, no, I appreciate your passion, Benjamin, for education and for learning.
Benjamin: All right. Thanks for your time.
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