TUITION

 TUITION

From one of contemptuous status, if an act has assumed significance of contemporary value, it is Tuition. It is an elegant game of playing on the nerves of the ‘consumer’ to his or her ultimate tolerance by mind and money.  I am reminded of our days in school. It was the ‘surest Sin’ to undertake or undergo tuition. Any boy or girl who had real cognitive inadequacy alone was deemed eligible to receive coaching – more as an exercise of systematizing the learner by devoting time to learn under the immediate supervision of a teacher. Those days teachers were not too inclined to undertake such work and generally used to ‘discourage’ the parents from trying to put the ward on coaching. Also, they would readily offer to help the boy/ girl for any clarification in the lunch hour, instead of ‘reading’ an opportunity to make an income. Certainly, the then teachers were in financial penury, but rich in abilities to teach. Honestly, they would take it an insult if his /her ward were to be given ‘extra-coaching’ implying that the teacher was not effective in his/her classroom effort.   

There is a huge shift in trends. Is it a paradigm shift? Really, I find it hard to decipher as to what drives the teacher-taught ensemble to readily settle for ‘tuitions’ right from second standard onwards. None feels it shameful to be under a round the clock vigil of some teacher or the other. Many people are driven by mass-psychology and fear that my child would be left alone, unless put through the same exercise of being at school or tuition except for hours of sleep. Tuition teachers are very smart. They make the student attend to all home work in tuition teacher’s home, with no complaints from school of the student’s default to such assignments. Parents are effectively silenced and the teacher profitably engages self. What an arrangement is this?  Parents tell their neighbours, ”after putting him/her to tuition, [s]he has become systematic and has no time to TV or friends”. They seldom realize that  all his mates are in the same place most of the time continuing with their schedules as ever except that they do not carry ‘dues’ on home work.

It is a marginal gain for the ward to have picked the habit of doing assignment work in time. But, does the cost input over a tuition justify the returns thereof? Beside the inadequate or disproportionate input to output equation, a psychological uncertainty gets unleashed in the minds of learners. They get to develop a fear that “unless tutored, I may not be able to learn anything on my own”. Undoubtedly, it is the most undesirable state of mind for youth; inadvertently, the boy/girl assume that they must receive’ personal guidance’ from teachers. The basic ability to distinguish right from wrong and other approaches of ‘associational learning’ and the strategies of using those skills get weakened and murky as age advances. Never for a moment imagine that ‘the merit’ of a person is related to the sore[s]he achieves in examinations. Many students who were ‘less promising’ in early part of life reach the zenith of skill –as most of them  are late bloomers. Have you heard of ‘gold medalists’ making a mark in their life in office or family? They score high in examinations but not in life. Provide for child’s all round development instead of ‘targeting the child’ to what you consider supreme. World is a huge stage full of opportunity for those who play their game by instinct and do not look around for instructions from coach or tutor.

Prof. K. Raman