When my team was learning about Kubernetes we worked through Kelsey Hightower's "Kubernetes the Hard Way": https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

Obviously this much more complicated that using a tool such as kubeadm to deploy Kubernetes however it gives you a really good understanding of how a Kubernetes cluster is put together.

One of my colleagues used the experience from working through this with a set of VMs to create a tool called kubicle: https://ciao-project.github.io/kubicle.html

This allows you to build a Kubernetes cluster on your own physical machines by building it on top of a Ciao cluster if you're not able to use public cloud hosted VMs. For learning you can combine this with Ciao's "singlevm"/ccloudvm mode to run a cluster inside a VM (with nested VMs.)

Full disclosure: I currently work on the Ciao team @ Intel :-)