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BY JENNIFER 21 Feb 2010 04:02
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I have been providing tuition for seventeen years. But I still ask myself and parents who call me up "is the tuition 'arms race' really getting out of hand? How necessary is the tuition and will it be effective?"
My tutors do not always get it right. Recently, I was helping a boy prepare for a university application. He had become interested by his Persian heritage, and we had been waiting keenly for hours for one of my rather glamorous tutors who is a Cambridge Politics graduate of Iranian emigre descent to show up and help us both out (yes, even tutors now hire tutors...). It was to be her first tutorial and she was very nervous. Instead of coming to us at 'X' Park Road, she knocked on the door of an imposing house in 'Y' Park Road, was shown into a dining room by a maid, who then summoned a nine year old boy. Both seemed as inured with the arrival through the door of a tutor as with junk mail being dropped through the letter box. After twenty minutes of a lecturing the little boy on Iranian politics, starting in 1954, my tutor realised she had the wrong house, and made her excuses and left. For the boy, it had been homework as usual.
This made me really think about the excessiveness of tutoring ˆ should it be so commonplace? There are some children who are only used to doing school work at home if there is a tutor or parent sitting over them. This cannot be a good thing?
Whatever my cynicism, there is a massive benefit of one to one tuition at home, that many schools have come to accept. Head teachers who actively discourage tutoring must realise that school is just one part of a wider process of education that includes parental involvement and tuition. After all, tutors have been around for much longer than schools. Victorian boys would lodge near schools with their tutors ˆ that was an origin of boarding houses. The pivotal role of the private tutor goes right back to Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great, and was possibly the most influential educator in history.
There's a real functional need for mothers ˆ and it is the mums who drive this - to prepare their children not to become conquerors of the known world (that can wait), but for the more immediate and Machiavellian challenge of beating their class mates to a place at the best London day schools in 8, 11 and 13 Plus tests. It all becomes charmingly cloak and dagger when Prep school heads threaten to tell senior schools about children who are being tutored, so mothers keep tutors under a veil of secrecy to stop rival mothers of competing students 'shopping' them in, even though they are all having outside help, sometimes from the same tutor. However, I find that the senior schools themselves often advise parents of talented, but disadvantaged children to seek tuition. For older students success to any top university requires top grades across the board (only twenty years ago, a number of my Oxford contemporaries lacked a Maths 'O' Level). Everyone now needs good A Levels, and tuition can only help. More worryingly, though, I find that children are far less able to study on their own, lacking the discipline, skills and initiative, than they were a generation ago, so are in more need of guidance.
So the need for tuition is there, but the concern is two fold: tutoring children through even the most basic homework tasks because everyone else is doing it and, secondly, hiring student tutors who are totally untrained in tutoring methods and curricula but are just living off their academic wits. This can be enough. An engaging postgraduate medical student who has the initiative to research the curriculum and is a born teacher can be the catalyst to inspire a child to study science. Tutoring agencies, however vilified by schools, do feed back into the education system the energy and raw brain power of thousands of young postgraduate students, actors, freelance writers, journalists, and more recently, bankers and aspiring slum landlords. So this is generally positive. Sure, it costs parents money, but good education can only be valued, not priced.
Nevertheless, I can understand why teachers are irritated when their students are retaught the same material at home by a tutor. Most schools raise eyebrows when tutors are not trained teachers, but many fabulous teachers do not make inspiring tutors because tutoring just does not appeal to them. A child who will not respond to a brilliant class room teacher may respond to a reasonable private tutor, and this owes more to attention difficulties than teaching standards. For this reason, my tutors do try to work with schools, for teaching and tutoring must complement each other despite being different processes. It is not necessary for tutors to be trained teachers, but they must be trained tutors. Since there is no such official tutor certification, more than any agency, we invest in our own training, that combines the core aspects of teacher training with tutoring methods and strict procedures, and is specific to each tutor we contract.
Most importantly, we expect tutors to become victims of their own success. Each of our tutorials is an exercise in mastering the basics and study skills, designed to do away with the need for a tutor for routine work. But even when a child has mastered the art of learning and preparing for exams, the benefits of a really inspiring tutors who can push intellectual boundaries and provide mentorship, all tailor made to the individual learner, should not be overlooked.
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Learning, Tutoring