Raising Girls Who Like Themselves by Kasey Edwards

Author:Kasey Edwards [Kasey Edwards and Dr Christopher Scanlon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760894375
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

The tutoring arms race

You might be on board with the importance of play. And you may agree that extracurricular activities such as dance, tribal drumming or theatre can be dropped. But what about academic extracurricular activities like tutoring? Aren’t they good for kids? A lot of parents think so. In fact, Australian Tutoring Association chief executive Mohan Dhall estimates the number of students being tutored is as high as one in seven.7

When we were school-aged, tutoring was the exception. It was for kids who had missed a lot of school because they’d been sick, or in hospital, and needed to catch up. Or it was for kids who had specific learning difficulties and needed special help in a particular area.

Not anymore: tutoring has become commonplace. And it’s not just that more children are enrolled in tutoring; there has also been an explosion in the kinds of subjects kids can be tutored for. There is a tutoring service for every occasion, from ‘school readiness’ tutoring for kids who are almost still in nappies, to exam preparation tutoring for NAPLAN, selective entry school exams and Year 12 exams. Then there is the everyday tutoring to make sure your kid gets to take home readers from the advanced box, or is among the first in her class to recite her times tables. While there may be occasions when some children need help with a specific area of learning, the expansion of tutoring suggests that it is no longer about ensuring children don’t fall behind. Rather, it seems to be about getting ahead of the next kid.

Tanith Carey, author of Taming the Tiger Parent, says the increase in the number of children undertaking tutoring, and its broadening into a whole range of areas, feeds on parents’ fears about their children getting left behind. Parents see other parents enrolling their kids in tutoring so they feel that they should too, and before they know it, they are coughing up their hard-earned cash and their children are being over-scheduled.8 In short, parents and their children have been recruited, often unwittingly and for the best of intentions, into an arms race of achievement.

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