Collapse of the classroom

It is not unusual for students to create their own timetables, learning strategies during exam season

When a young relative told me a couple of years ago that he has stopped going to school altogether, and was studying on his own during his O-levels, my initial reaction was sympathetic. As the exam season gets around the corner, it is not unusual for students to create their own timetables and learning strategies. But soon I learned that this was not exam season. Exams were months away. The family member was simply doing what many of his peers were doing. They were not going to school regularly (though they were still paying the full fee of the private institution) but instead attending a tuition academy. In this particular case, the family member was further supplementing it with at-home help from a teacher who came over three days a week. Recognising that I am out of touch with the current trends, I asked around. The response from dozens of family members and friends was more or less the same. There is great reliance on tuition centres (or academies as they are often called) and a combination of academy and at-home help is not at all unusual.

This, of course, is not a new phenomenon. Three decades ago in the early 1990s when I was in high school in Islamabad, academies had started to appear. Just to be clear, I think the idea of having extra help for those who may need is, in and of itself, sound and important. But there is more to it, and some of it is quite problematic. Even back then, our own teachers who were least interested in teaching during the day were known to be master instructors in private academies that operated in the evening. But the idea of skipping the classroom altogether was not something that existed as it does now. Of course, with time and continued decline in educational standards, regulation or accountability, there is a greater market for providing what the schools are uninterested in providing.

The rise of the tuition centres has been studied by several education experts around the country and elsewhere. It is driven by weak wages in schools and high cost of living that drives teachers towards private tuition. This rise is further amplified by lack of regulation and accountability in both the public and private education sector. But there is another factor, and that is a demand for better performance in final exams, or more specifically better test taking skills. Tuition academies promise that abundantly. At the same time, many private schools are perfectly fine with students not coming to the class, as long as their parents and caregivers are able to pay the fees on time.

A consequence of the development of this ecosystem is the collapse of the classroom. With a sole focus on exam performance, students are missing out on one of the most vital parts of education: peer to peer learning and engaging with others. They are unable to argue and debate with their classmates or learn from their perspectives. They do not get to talk about ethics or argue about issues in the society at large. In the academies, the emphasis is not on thinking or analysis, but test performance. Due to the transactional nature of this relationship and the business model, the instructors at the academies have little interest in developing critical thinking skills, but instead focus on their students learning how to do well on the exam. They would skip several sections of the text because it is less likely to be tested, and would develop their entire teaching model on the exam, and not on learning.

The debate about lack of critical thinking in our curriculum is extremely important. So is the discussion about teaching ethics, tolerance, recognising the faults in our own views and learning from others. But curriculum reform alone is unlikely to make any serious impact. Enabling environment is just as important. If there is no classroom or a rich learning environment, then the engagement with curriculum, no matter how deep or thoughtful, is going to be superficial and transactional.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 3^rd, 2023.

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