By WACHIRA KIGOTHO
It is the wish of all parents to give their children the best, including a quality of education that they themselves were unable to get. This in realization education is a means to advance one’s career options.
In Kenya, for instance, even the poorest households in rural areas and urban slums are aware of the benefits of education.
According to a recent study by the International Research on Working Children, education in Kenya is seen as a means to an end and anything contrary is deemed as a plot to hold children back from their career goals.
Subsequently, the intention by the Ministry of Education to ban extra tuition in primary and secondary schools is not likely to get support from many stakeholders, irrespective of its noble objectives.
According to Minister Mutula Kilonzo, extra tuition, also known as private coaching, is a handicap to organised learning as it creates stress and tension to learners.
To some parents, private coaching is a barrier for pupils from poor families to access to education. It is an additional cost and has become an illegal means to supplement teacher’s salaries. Private coaching is also seen as a disruptive element to free learning.
Hard nut to crack
Nonetheless, extra tuition has become almost a permanent fixture in Kenya’s education system, just as it is in many other parts of the world. In addition to the extra coaching that goes on after the regular classes in both public and private schools, an orchestrated private coaching industry has emerged that include private tutoring franchises held during the holidays in private premises, churches and homes.
Ordinarily children do not learn at the same rate and have different level of understanding of the material presented in the school curriculum. In this regard, proponents of extra tuition maintain that slow learners need extra time to master the content and even to supersede their fast learning counterparts.
However, whereas the Government attests its ambitions to eradicate private coaching, it will not be an easy task as Mutula and his education officials seem to believe.
Dr Mark Bray, a former Director of Unesco’s International Institute for Educational Planning, says private coaching has emerged as a global ‘shadow education’ system with roots almost in every country.
Lessons from South Korea
“Private coaching has no borders as it prevails from the least income countries such as Cambodia and Kenya to the highest income countries such as Japan, Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan,” says Bray, who is the Unesco chair in Comparative Education at the University of Hong Kong.
But it is in South Korea where about two trillion shillings shadow education industry has raised its ugly head and has also defied the Government’s efforts to bring it under control because of parent’s willingness to invest in education of their children.
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Bray says South Korea’s private coaching industry, which is composed of cram schools, is more than half the sum spent on public education.
To reduce the addiction to private coaching, South Korea has embarked on a curfew that includes huge payments to informers to turn in violators. So far, it is not very clear whether Mutula will urge the Government to employ platoons of investigators of after-school-hours-academies or to increase more teachers.
Nevertheless, he might decide to talk to his counterpart from Mauritius where the Government recently amended Education Act to extend ban on private tuition to pupils in lower primary. However, should Mutula decide to go towards this direction, the Government should be prepared to be sued by parents who might claim their children have been denied rights to education.
For Mauritius, the Government, early this year, introduced an enhanced remedial education programme as an alternative to private coaching in lower primary to avoid litigation.
No matter which direction the Government takes, shadow education system is deeply rooted in the country. The Unesco-backed Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality, a partnership of 15 ministries of education, says about 90 per cent of pupils in Kenya’s primary schools receive extra coaching.
“Such is also the case in Uganda, Seychelles and South Africa,” says Bray.
Parents in Kenya pay for extra coaching to raise test scores in public exams that are purely used as selection tools for higher education. So long as performance in public exams remains cornerstone to academic success, putting one firmly on the road to social mobility, parents will continue being drivers of academic intensity and extreme competition in schools in the country.
Restore confidence
Even whereas the ministry might claim to have powers and competence to determine the dimensions of coverage of curriculum content, its authority is grossly undermined by the poor performance of public primary schools in KCPE. More so since launching of the free primary education, the ministry has failed to restore confidence in the public primary education system beyond enforcing free learning environment in the schools.
Despite Government funding, public primary schools have lagged behind their private counterparts, effectively lowering parental confidence on State’s capacity to provide quality primary education.
Nevertheless, such shortcomings are not proof to suggest that extra tuition would solve existing educational problems. No doubt the prevailing educational issues are too complex and go beyond the simplistic ban of extra tuition or allowing cram schools and all manner of extra-coaching set-ups that fleece parents.
However, to reduce extravagant extra coaching that is just a money-minting machine, the ministry could adopt the South Korean experiment where the Government has introduced school-based evaluation system and standardised tests.
Such quality mechanisms would boost confidence in public education and reduce stress and tension among students. Traditionally, such strategies are also meant to stir competition in controlled school environment and help teachers to identify slow learners.
Shadow education system
However, according to Bray, who taught in Kenya schools in 1980s, it is not all shadow education that is negative.
In Kenya, the root cause of the problem is that education planners at Jogoo House are not asking themselves as to why poor parents are willing to invest their meagre financial resources to supplement the schooling of their children in public schools.
So far, the ministry has failed to pay attention to obstacles that enhance inequalities in educational achievement, especially among pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Taking into account that most parents have identified education as a lifeline for their children from poverty to economic and social empowerment, then it will be hard for the Government to enforce a ban on extra coaching.
Whereas, it is possible for the ministry to ensure extra coaching is not carried within public schools, it will be impossible to monitor shadow education within informal franchises that include pupil’s homes.
As Bray has pointed out, shadow education system is a rat race that no Government ministry has won. Nonetheless, the one-size-fits-all primary education system that is geared towards attaining high scores in KCPE has become a catalyst to cramming.