From supplementation to supplantation : expansion and role of private tutoring in urban Maharashtra, India

Abstract

The rampant proliferation of private supplementary tutoring (PST) in India has made it a natural part of the social fabric as well as the educational process of many students’ lives. Educational planners and policy makers have failed to show much interest in the field despite the backwash on mainstream schooling and exacerbation of social inequalities. There is a dearth of in-depth studies in populations with high PST participation rates, particularly with focus on relationships between private tutoring and mainstream schooling. This dissertation aims to reduce the gap by investigating the role of PST vis-à-vis mainstream education in the lives of Class 12 Science students in a part of urban Maharashtra.

The mixed, purposefully selected sample in this qualitative study comprised students, parents, PST providers and a mainstream teacher. Data was collected using questionnaires and semi-structured and unstructured interviews. While the educational experiences of the 12 student participants over their two years of higher secondary schooling formed the crux of this study, data concerning their PST experiences in the earlier years of schooling was also collected.

The findings indicated the increasing role of PST in the educational journey of the students. Private tutoring played a supplementary role in the primary and secondary years and gained importance as a way of preparation for the Maharashtra State Class 10 examinations. The last two years of higher secondary showed a much stronger emergence of PST pointing to an erosion in the role of mainstream as parameters of PST took precedence over those of mainstream institutions. The indications are therefore that PST seems to supplant mainstream education, disestablishing mainstream as the dominant medium for delivering formal education. The fact that PST seemed to be having its own shadow also indicated its larger-than-mainstream role. The study has also shown that the shifting of roles between mainstream and PST are dictated by a complex interplay of social, economic and educational factors and are in turn likely to have implications in all these three aspects. On this basis, it may be inferred that the dynamics of PST need to be included into both academic and political discourses so that educational policies targeting social equality do not end up getting negated by PST sector.