Students are victims of this tuition culture because they are missing out on the enjoyable aspects of school life.
KARACHI: In recent times, there seems to have been an exponential rise in the number of students taking after-school tuitions for various subjects. Schools seem to have just become a registration portal for board examinations, whereas tuition centres have taken up the role of schools and are quite successful in producing students who achieve good grades. The student population is at the receiving end of this culture of tuitions as they are missing out on various extra-curricular activities and a healthy social life. From teachers’ perspective, they are often not paid an adequate salary to maintain a satisfactory lifestyle and hence, opt for teaching tuitions after school to generate more income. For this reason, they often lower their standards of teaching in school to ensure that more students come to them for tuitions.
As stated previously, students are victims of this tuition culture because they are missing out on the enjoyable aspects of school life, which in turn, is damaging their social development. The key to discourage this culture is for schools to respect the dignity of the teaching profession and pay them respectable salaries, as well as parents and society at large, putting a little less emphasis on achieving excellent grades and a bit more on developing well-rounded individuals.
Khurram Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, April 5th, 2013.
