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Why are private tuitions becoming popular among students in India?
Pratham’s Annual Status of Education report (ASER) has reported that class V student cannot read a second-grade book. Such is the condition of our schooling system. The direct fallout of a poor education system is increased reliance on expensive coaching and tuitions.
The Indian education system is in the ICU, especially the primary and secondary levels. There is solid evidence to back this claim. For the last 10 years, Pratham’s Annual Status of Education report (ASER) reports, almost an authority in this field and known for its robust data and analysis, has been reporting that learning levels of primary students are so abysmal that a class V student cannot read a second-grade book.
Read: ASER’S 2014 REPORT
The direct fallout of a poor education system is increased reliance on expensive coaching and tuitions. A recent National Sample Survey Organisation report estimates that about 11% – 12% of a family’s budget is allocated to coaching classes and tuitions. Almost 71 million or 26% of the total number of students in the country take tuitions.
Unsurprisingly, over 89% of people said the main reason going in for private coaching was adding value to the basic education. In other words, school education is absolutely inadequate. Now think about those students who cannot afford expensive out-of-school coaching. They are the biggest victims of a failed school system.
Why are children flocking to private tuitions or coaching classes?
The first finger is pointed towards the quality of teaching staff. “Our schools are not delivering because there is no effort to improve the teaching quality. This holds not only true for low-end State-run schools but even Kendriya Vidyalayas,” said Vimala Ramachandran, Senior Fellow, National University of Educational Planning and Administration.
Secondly, private schools are designed to involve parents as part-educators. When parents cannot fulfil this role, they are compelled to send their children to tuitions. Additionally, many students in State-run schools are first-generation learners so their parents are not equipped to tackle their children’s education needs and hence forced to send their wards to coaching classes.
Thirdly the success of schools in India is measured on parameters which are neither learning processes nor teaching. In fact they are, enrolment, attendance, mid-day meals and participation in training programmes, Unfortunately the focus is not on solid parameters.
Lastly, the most important cog of the system, the teachers view their profession as just another job. After RTE came into force in 2009, a lot of funds and energy was diverted on building infrastructure in schools. However, somewhere along the way the backbone of the education system, the teachers were forgotten. Before the Act was passed, educational degrees were enough to get a teacher’s job, however, even though RTE introduced a teacher eligibility test, there is a considerable backlog of teachers who came through the earlier system and who may not qualify today.
Even the in-service training of teachers is corruption-ridden. Instead of designing customised training programs to meet the individual needs of teachers and providing school-specific inputs, a cookie-cutter solution was offer that made everyone goes through a similar 20-day training module.
In a recent appraisal of the Finnish education system, considered to be the best in the world, a Finnish teacher said, “I think that teaching is like sailing. You have a target where you want to go but when you go to a classroom you don’t know which way the wind is going to go.”
It is clear what plagues our system and yet we see a lot of quantitative measures are undertaken and not qualitative one. How about beginning to accord the true respect and place to teachers in the society as a whole and the education system in particular.