As parents prepare to send their children back to the classroom some are wondering how well their children are going to do, I guess numerically speaking. Even further, some parents are already lining up tutors before their children even set foot through the classroom door. In a previous article "classroom supplies" I talked about the 350 billion dollar customers of corporations that schools are, and this includes the dollars spent on tutoring businesses and private tutors. The big question I pose in this article is, to what end do we spend all this money?
I raise these questions because of what I noted as a private tutor for many years. It's one heck of a boring enterprise, but lucrative for the one getting paid. Some private tutors charge 30-35 dollars an hour while tutoring businesses will have one mortgaging a house. And with these services the children are not rehearsing for a play, learning an instrument (a more practical form of tutoring), writing their own wonderful stories with a friend, doing science experiments based on their own interests or taking "trips" around the world to study other cultures and places with hands on lessons. Typically they are doing worksheets, getting homework support, or getting help practicing those algorithmic skills. Why? So they can pass a test and be "smarter."
I dreaded my private sessions as a tutor. Whereas in my class I can run around laughing and having discussions, facilitating great projects, listening in on a group discussion or watching a a pair read together, while tutoring I have to sit at a table and painfully watch as the student fumbles about with a worksheet or some contrived lesson I threw together for the day's session. I hated it, and despite the money, got ouf of the business altogether.
It was then I started to think that the whole business of tutoring doesn't make any sense at all. In most cases the student in question doesn't want to be tutored, which is the first indicator that it's not a good idea at all. In fact, many students loathe tutoring. Imagine a parent coming home from a long day's work and tiwce a week having to sit down after dinner with the his boss for an hour so the boss can reveal strategies for being a better employee. Think about how the parent in that situation would feel. That's how the student feels, only with less of an attention span.
On top of it, a parent rates the success of tutoring based on higher test scores, which as I've written previously amounts to a superficial hill of beans. In other words, the money spent supporting private and organized business is not helping to make children critical or free thinkers. It's not instilling better character or inspiring them to create or soar to new heights. It's essentially aiding them as they climb or stumble up the ladder of a flawed system that quantifies success.
My advice to parents is put the money toward music lessons or enrichment programs selected by your child, and throw your child's lack of "success" back at the institution, because in the end it's the system's fault if your child doesn't "make the grade." So blame them. Part of the NCLB legislation says that schools are mandated to give parents of struggling students a list of outside agencies they can use to help keep the child afloat (another example of how the policymakers subtly help the business world), but this is only so the school can attest to fulfilling their responsibility for a non achieving student.
Think it over and put the extra money toward a nice family trip. That's what kids remember, not the tutor.