The myth of taking tuition

Of late there’s such a hulabaloo made about tuition – the whys and wherefores.
The necessity of taking tuition is a myth, not unlike the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus’ boulder keeps rolling down to the foothills every time he manages to get it up to the hilltop. It’s an exercise in futility. Going for tuition today is fashionable but it’s likewise a waste of effort.

School teachers are made to look bad in this controversy. The popular belief is that school teachers can’t cope. Give the teachers a class of 25 or even 30 and you would be surprised just how superb they really are. Are the Malaysian taxpayers ready to address the twin and perennial problems of overcrowded classrooms and overworked teachers? Try teaching about 50 restless kids with 50 different personalities and you’ll know!

A lot of parents, some of them teachers themselves, coerce their kids into going for tuition for the simple reason that they must keep up with the Tans, the Ahmads and the Muthusamys. They panic when they see other kids going for tuition. The rationale is that their kids might not be able to keep up with the rest if they don’t attend tuition. Therefore, is there a REAL need or is it a PERCEIVED one?

I remember that when I was studying for my exams while at the university I’d borrow lots of reference books and then line them up on my study table. I’d look at them and feel very confident that if I ever needed to refer to them they would be at hand. To be honest, I never touched those books, not for any of those exams. But then I felt “safe” having those books right in front of me every time I sat down to study my notes. Parents feel psychologically “safe” when they send their kids for tuition, notwithstanding the fact that they are already excellent students. So do we blame the school teachers for this tuition frenzy?

If kids are reasonably intelligent, listen to their teachers during lessons, do their homework faithfully and are always one step ahead of the teacher (by reading up the topic before the teacher starts teaching so that they know what the teacher is talking about), do self-study, and read widely, is there a REAL need for tuition?

The tuition centres use marketing psychology to make parents feel this panic by telling them if they send their kids to their centres, the kids are going to gain 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on and so forth but woe be unto them if they keep their kids at home. The “slow” kid probably needs tuition but if classes at school are small they don’t either. Some tuition classes are simply replicas of the typical Malaysian classroom.

Why torture the kids? Some kids never experience real childhood because their life is a merry-go-round of school, tuition and more tuition (piano lessons, ballet lessons, swimming lessons, riding lessons, what-have-you lessons). Whatever for? Are they going to end up super adults or freaks? Do you think they really enjoy all these lessons? Why not save your time sending and fetching them to and from tuition/other lessons and save your money buying so much petrol? Why not use the money saved for buying a set of first-class encyclopedias or for their higher education? Why not spend the time saved in guiding your kids a little? Why abdicate your responsibility entirely to the tuition centres?

The time they spend travelling to and fro could be used for leisure-reading which is so very enjoyable or even for watching TV (not everything on TV is bad. There are so many fun cartoons, very educational documentaries and excellent movies). They could even spend the time lazing about the house. Don’t ever think a child is wasting time if he is staring into space. He is really reflecting and using his imagination which is really important. Some kids have to take a bus or even buses for tuition and some get kidnapped while waiting at bus-stops and some meet worse, unmentionable fates. So, I wonder why parents go to all the trouble.

The merits of tuition are negligible and in our folly we are simply enriching tuition centres which build their success on the hard work of school teachers. If school teachers are unethically willing to “leak” exam questions to students, our kids would all score too. Kids attend tuition for a short while and wonder of wonders their marks improve melodramatically. The tuition centres must be better than Harry Potter’s school of magic! Is there any real improvement? Teachers at school hold back much useful information and this will be downloaded into the ears of their own students who attend their tuition classes. A very strategic move, all in the name of money.

Finally, today’s kids don’t know how to THINK anymore because they have tuition teachers to do all the thinking for them. Thinking takes too much effort. It is tedious and tiring so it is easier to get the tuition teachers to do their homework for them by providing them the answers. Kids today don’t struggle to figure things out themselves. They run to their tuition teachers every time they are stumped. If one tuition teacher can’t help, it’s of no consequence as they have a plethora of them. Kids today are experts at taking the easy way out. It’s fine to provide them a lifeline in case they drown but why provide so many? The Malaysian society needs to reinvent itself to become a resourceful one, not train our kids to become so dependent on others. Tuition helps create the dependent culture amongst today’s schoolchildren.

Note : This article was published as a lettert in the "Let's Hear It" page of Star Education, The Sunday Star dated 23 February 2003. It elicited quite a number of responses.