Feeding off educational incompetence
Slogans like “We provide complete support to students of all levels” appear on signboards and posters around the numerous tuition centres that have sprung up in Kathmandu. The word “support” is key here; it posits that the tuition centre is there to facilitate students’ education and to provide them with “easy solutions” to academic hurdles.
Mostly run by entrepreneurs who are not directly related to the country’s educational sector, tuition centres find their status as lodged between educational institutions and educational consultancies. They are not registered professional advisors like educational consultancies are. Yet, they render certain “services” to students and charge them a stipulated amount of fees, just as consultancies do.
These centres also tend to mimic educational institutions in that they run classes every day at designated hours. But it is in their pedagogic approach that they differ. While schools and colleges are meant to be holistic institutions of learning where students acquire various life skills, tuition centres are places where tutors only impart selected, prescribed lessons—they teach according to pay and students themselves expect nothing more than what they have shelled out their pockets for.
These students come to tuition centres seeking capsulised information—syllabi that have been broken down and sifted through—so that they might be told what to focus on and what not to focus on when they appear for the university exams.
Such attitudes make tuition centres seem like a commercial mecca for good grades but owners of centres cite poor academic support in schools and colleges to justify their presence. Sanjeev, the owner of one centre specialising in management courses says, “There are no regular classes in government institutions. Students needed to be guided through their academic course. Tuition centres in the Valley sprung up simply to fill that void.”
Nevertheless, it is clear that tuition centres are not academic institutions. They are a strictly business environment where students are offered classes for a fee of 8,000 rupees per session, depending on the number of lessons taught, and the teachers—often the same ones who work at colleges and universities—teach to earn 80 percent of the total revenue collected from each class. Given that tuition centres are laying claim to what colleges and higher educational institutions are supposed to be doing already, which is teaching students what is prescribed in the designated syllabi, there seems to be no apparent need for them. However, the reality is, as Sanjeev points out, tuition centres flourish to compensate for the inadequacies of formal educational institutions.
Several students support Sanjeev’s view. Prabin Bhandari, a student of Management who recently finished his BBS from a government-run campus in Kathmandu, says, “Tuition centres were the most feasible and easily accessible classrooms for me, as compared to my university, where seats often ran out.” Bhandari would have to get to class by 5:30 am, an hour and a half before the lesson begins. Sailesh Dahal, a student of MBBS from the same college voices similar complaints. “There are too many students in class. My own roll number lies in the one thousands and I don’t even know what the total strength of my class is.”
Dahal says it is difficult for students enrolled at government colleges—particularly those studying management who cannot solve complex mathematical problems without the guidance of a teacher—to study for their university exams by themselves. He also complains that while some teachers are extremely sincere in their work, others slack considerably. “There are some teachers who do not even come to college to deliver their lectures. If there are three days of classes that they are assigned to every week, they show up for one.” It is such an environment that compels students like Dahal to enroll in tuition centres.
However, students from private colleges too come to be taught the same things they are taught in college. “Scoring high” seems to be the priority for these students, who benefit from the centres’ focus on specific sample questions that will feature in the university exams. Sunil Singh, who teaches Accounts to Intermediate and Bachelors level students at a tuition centre in the Valley, says, “Our main focus here is to prepare students for their final exams. We cover model question books so that they are prepared for whatever’s thrown at them in their final examinations.”
This makes it clear that tuition centres are only a means to an end—to enable students to pass exams, but not necessarily learn. After all, no tuition centre in Kathmandu claims to be a “temple of knowledge” or “foundation of wisdom” like many schools and colleges do. The very existence of these centres is indicative of a lack of quality in our formal educational institutions.
Educationist Prem Aryal (PhD) comments that this culture of passing and scoring high in examinations has left the actual meaning of education in the shadows. For Aryal often finds that students who have passed their exams to reach a certain grade do not actually have the competency to belong there. “The weakness of the Nepali education system is this very emphasis on academic excellence and the lack of interaction between teachers and students in class,” he says.
Students, teachers, as well as the owners of Kathmandu’s thriving tuition centres all acknowledge the redundancy of these institutions. The centres continue to flourish regardless, and its booming business, which feeds off the incompetence of formal educational institutions, seems to be here to stay as long as the facilities in schools and colleges don’t measure up.
Posted on: 2011-06-11 09:27
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