A Class of Their Own: Adventures in Tutoring the Super-Rich. By Matt Knott. Trapeze £9.99
After he had graduated from university, Matt Knott spent a few years tutoring children of extremely rich parents. His account of this is very amusing (such as ‘you wouldn’t believe what some of these people call their children’), but it also provides an insight into the lives of the wealthiest.
This is a world where PJs are private jets rather than pyjamas. Where people take a personal chef on holiday with them. Where people have a chalet in St Moritz and a holiday home in Kenya with a privately-owned beach that is only used at Christmas. Where it is acceptable to take a 45-minute helicopter ride in order to go to a restaurant in Rome. Where a family employ a driver (‘I had realised that the word “chauffeur” was terribly common’). Where living in North Kensington is nowhere near as prestigious as living in Kensington. The super-rich apparently have ‘a way of dressing casually which only served to highlight their wealth’. Yet their lives are often empty at their core.
Tutoring really meant being a ‘study buddy’ or a posh babysitter. A tutor is a status symbol, as everyone in a school class has one. Of one boy he writes, ‘How many people had he encountered in his life who were only there because his parents were paying them?’ Knott felt he had been paid to be his friend. In general the kids had no ‘sense of freedom’, having been led to believe that everything is a competition, though clearly they were rather freer than working-class children. One boy gets into the school his parents had chosen for him (but not because his father paid for a new sports centre). International demand – from Russia, for instance – has increased the competition for places at English public schools.
Knott also spent some time volunteering to help state school pupils. He derived far more satisfaction from helping a Muslim girl get into Cambridge than from the mega-rich kids he was paid to teach.
Paul Bennett
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