Our story

Cicero began on a boat.

Somewhere off the coast of Papua New Guinea, over a janky internet connection, our family had a first video call with a master educator named Hadley Westman. It changed our educational lives, and eventually became Cicero.

The “Dafnes” boatschooling in the Chagos archipelago.

How it started

A family, a sailboat,
and one incredible teacher.

Lani Bevacqua, Paul Bennett and their three daughters — Stella, Cleo and Jade — were living aboard Dafne, crossing oceans. School had to work at sea, across time zones, a thousand miles from the nearest classroom.

Working with Hadley, and then a small team of similarly-minded teachers, the “Dafnes” evolved a different way to learn: match one-on-one with a great teacher, and build the curriculum around the student’s own goals rather than a rigid curriculum.

Here’s what it looked like:

Stella

A high-school senior, workshopping her college essays with a literature teacher.

Cleo

A sophomore, going deep on marine science with a biologist — with the ocean outside the hatch.

Jade

A seventh-grader, discovering Latin with a magister of her own.

Pairing with an educator pushed all three children further than a classroom ever had. That is the idea behind Cicero: let skilled, passionate educators do what they do best, and kids will fall in love with learning.

Cicero isn’t a different version of online education. This is a whole new beast — the way royalty and aristocrats were educated through history. It’s the very pinnacle of education.”

Marc Randolph · co-founder of Netflix

The name

Who was Cicero?

A lawyer and philosopher in Ancient Rome who stood up to Julius Caesar and decried the death of the Republic — on the right side of history. He was also an educator in the public sense, who argued that each person has a moral duty to develop themselves to the fullest. Education wasn’t a nice-to-have for Cicero. It was fundamental to being a person.

Centuries later, English adventurers on the grand tour hired archaeologists in Rome to show them the newly unearthed antiquities. They thought of these experts as teachers, and called them cicerone, after Cicero.

It is still the Italian word for guide.