Tutors International, the world’s leading provider of full time private tuition, today commented on a recent article about poor leadership skills in ex-boarding school students. Founder, Adam Caller, describes the character traits that make good leaders, which are rarely found in boarders who often struggle with the pressure from their environment.
In a recent article by The Guardian psychologist Nick Duffell purports that people who hold high-powered leadership positions are often from a boarding school background; the characters that need to survive the removal from the family home and the demands of boarding school culture produce adults who are “particularly deficient in non-rational skills, such as those needed to sustain relationships, and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be leaders in today's world.”
Adam Caller, Independent Educational Consultant and founder of the prestigious global tutoring agency, Tutors International, today published an article in which he agreed with this sentiment from the Guardian article’s author.
Mr Caller says, “Boarding school can be a great choice for some pupils – but not all. The boarding school culture doesn’t suit all types of child, and some struggle very obviously with the environment. Others find ways to cope, which may mean that they appear more confident than they really are.”
Both Mr Caller and Mr Duffell remark that elitism and bullying are traits that appear to carry through from boarding schools to the workplace. While Mr Duffell links the “privileged abandonment” of boarding schoolers to a survival personality where the student has had to grow up prematurely, and often incompletely, leading to poor leadership abilities in adulthood, Mr Caller remarks that the graduates he regularly encounters who have been to a boarding school are “made less attractive by their misogyny, swagger, and sense of entitlement.”
When comparing privately home-schooled students with those who go to boarding school, Mr Caller says, “removing a pupil from the competitiveness, and the social friction of boarding school can make a pupil more genuinely confident, capable, and a better leader. They are not hiding behind a façade, and they don’t need to swim with the sharks to survive in this stressful environment.”
He continued, “private tutoring develops natural leaders. For example, a student needs a new desk: instead of buying one, he and his tutor could study woodworking, computer-aided design, the student might source materials, talk to craftsmen, project manages the construction, the budget, and congratulates the team when the finished desk is unveiled. This sort of exposure to all kinds of people, at all levels of society, is what helps to make great leaders. And this is something that we rarely encounter in ex-boarders.”
About Tutors International
Tutors International is a worldwide organization providing experienced full-time private tutors to work with children of all ages and nationalities, in a wide variety of situations, including international relocation, after-school support, full-time home tuition, support for AD/HD and dyslexia, home schooling for frequent travellers, and college prep and coaching.
Tutors International was founded by Adam Caller who has tutored students of all ages. He has received specialist training in dyslexia and AD/HD and is very sensitive to children's educational difficulties. He has now turned this expertise to recruiting, training and placing other tutors with HNW and UHNW families around the world. Adam is a member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA).
