Let’s call a halt to this tutoring arms race

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/17/tutoring-arms-race-ethnic-minority

Version 0 of 1.

Anyone who wanders around public buildings in the late afternoon can see tutors hard at work. The children are decanted straight from school to a set of desks, often with the smell of chlorine wafting in from a swimming pool next door.

Tutoring is now big business, costing anything up to £1,000 an hour (though more usually, at least for a personal tutor, about £40). I’ve heard of children being tutored from the age of five. I’m not saying I would never send my own children to a tutor – it rather depends what happens – but five is too young.

So, it seems to me, is seven. Yet figures revealed this week by Newcastle University and the NatCen social research institute showed that as many as 5% of the nation’s seven-year-olds now have some kind of tutoring.

What if the whole tutoring idea is, except in certain narrow circumstances, misleading and self-justifying?

What has always confused me is why people put their children through this. But the new figures do provide some clues, because they offer a fascinating breakdown along ethnic lines.

From the age of 11, as many as 22% of UK children are seeing tutors. But there is a big gap between, on the one hand white children (20%) and, on the other, black children (47%) and Chinese children (48%).

This implies that the tutoring phenomenon, now a £6bn industry, is not just about the marketing of frenetic worry about education. Nor is it just a middle-class method of getting a leg up in the increasingly frantic environment known, rather misleadingly, as “school choice”. What the overwhelming ethnic-minority use of tutoring implies is that, quite reasonably, they feel their children need a leg up in the competitive race to the better schools, university places and careers.

It may be that my response to the idea of tutoring is middle class; I expect people may say that I can blithely dismiss the option from my already privileged position. But it worries me. Because what if the whole tutoring idea is, except in certain narrow circumstances, misleading and self-justifying?

There are certainly circumstances where tutoring makes sense: to get through a specific exam; to help catch up in maths, if that is holding you back; and for brief, intense periods. But what if hot-housing children like this, on a permanent basis, as a matter of course – and assuming that schools are not succeeding – is a thoroughly bad idea, a triumph of narrow education over broad education, so that the narrow drives out the broad?

Because hothousing narrow education has a circularity about it, a self-reinforcing element that measures success by exams that in turn measure narrow intelligence. These exams then yield narrow test scores, and league tables built on those basis – which then generates a demand for the kind of narrow teaching that produces this tutoring arms race. Meanwhile, the idea of broad education – about life, about the natural world, about music and creativity – often gets ignored completely.

It would answer the question posed recently by the National Trust, in their 50 Things To Do Before You’re 11¾ campaign: why weren’t children outside climbing trees or throwing stones into the sea, or building dens? The answer would appear to be that they are locked in with their tutors, or in the exercise room at their local swimming pool doing extra maths.

Related: The new boom in home tuition – if you can pay £40 an hour

In those circumstances, it matters that an ethnic divide is opening up. Why should ethnic minorities be forced into intensive narrow education if genuine life success depends on something broader?

Perhaps the answer, as always, lies in the way we have shaped schools over the past century or so. I don’t know if there is a gender bias in the tutoring world, but my sense is that more boys endure it, as a further attempt to cram them into a system that doesn’t suit them very well – 30 to a class, keeping quiet and still while they are filled with knowledge.

I wonder about how I was taught French. Why, after seven years of intensive teaching in French at my various schools, do I still barely speak the language? Perhaps I was lazy. Perhaps I have a blind spot for languages. But if we have to put children in school for the best part of the day – and we clearly do – then at least it should be effective.

If we are educating children in groups of 30 for years and years, when we could have imparted the skills better in small groups over a much shorter time, then aren’t we wasting money and time? Most of all, aren’t we wasting time when they might have been outside learning a little more about life?