School’s out, tuition’s in

“Attending tuition classes used to be like having a girlfriend; it was kept a secret because you weren’t considered a ‘good’ child,” says Dr Harish Shetty, social psychiatrist. “Now, it’s the opposite. It determines your status. If you don’t go for classes you have to hide it, as it means you can’t afford them,” says educationist Kavita Anand.

The business of tuition classes has undergone a makeover, burgeoning from backroom enterprise to booming industry, and is becoming an essential part of every student’s life. 
“It is no longer a supplement to school teaching,” says Krishan Khanna, activist and IIT alumnus. “It’s a parallel system of economics and education, one that is too powerful to be wished away.” 

Like in the case of Harish Singh, 15, who often bunks school because “it is a waste of time” but has yet to skip even one session of tuition class. “He wakes up at 6am to put in three hours with his tutor,” says his mother, Raveena Singh. Singh is part of a growing tribe of students for whom school is almost incidental to getting an education.  

According to a report released by iWatch, an NGO that works with education and governance, entrance exams for the IITs and  IIMs attract about 6 lakh applicants, who spend Rs2 lakh each on coaching. This amounts to Rs12,000 crore per year. The annual teaching budgets of these institutions is only Rs800-1,100 crore per year.

“The tuitions industry has become organised and is run professionally,” says Aakash Chaudhary, of the Aakash Institute, which coaches students for entrance exams to medical and engineering colleges. “Our students get the best faculty and feedback on where they stand. Schools simply cannot match this.”

The result has been a shift, sometimes unwilling, away from the schoolroom. “I didn’t want to take up extra lessons in class 9,” says Kartik Raghavan, 17. “But I suffered because teachers assumed we were getting outside help and did not bother teaching us properly.” Fed up, Raghavan enrolled in a coaching centre.

Even this drill is not enough for some. Mala Subramanium’s tuition classes include students who are also enrolled at prestigious coaching centres. “They say the centre gives them important inputs and a competitive edge, but they supplement it by asking me to solve questions and clear doubts,” she says.

The belief seems to be that you’re never too young to start. “There is a boom in tuitions for even toddlers — usually first-generation English speakers — carried out under euphemisms like creative writing and abacus classes,” says Durga Rao, a teacher at an ICSE school.

Arundhati Chavan, president of the Mumbai Parent-Teacher Association, says that coaching classes lead to an increased dependence on teachers. “Children expect to be provided all information by their teachers rather than exploring ideas themselves,” she says.

Ironically, says Saurabh Saxena, director of Aakar, an alternative learning centre, the rush for tuitions comes at a time when “premier institutions like IIT are re-evaluating their examination patterns and breaking away from the rote learning system that coaching centres excel in”.

Some schools and coaching centres are however trying to bridge the gap. “Since we cover the same syllabus, we are trying to find ways to synergise rather than work in isolation to save on time and avoid duplication,” says Chaudhary (see box).

But the cost — monetary and otherwise — of putting children through two parallel sets of classes is high. “You make friends at tuition class because there is no time to meet other people, and use school time to catch up on other work,” says Singh. Clearly, for an increasing number of students today, the last bell in school is just a signal for the next classroom session to begin.