Showing posts with label tutoring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tutoring. Show all posts

Thursday, July 05, 2012

War on Education: ADB Disdains Tutoring, Seeks Regulation

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) detests private tutoring which they pejoratively calls the “shadow education”

From Yahoo,

Asian parents are spending billions of dollars on private tutors for their children, and the practice is growing despite doubts over its effectiveness, according to a study published Wednesday.

"Shadow education" is an expanding business not only in wealthy countries but also in some of the region's poorer nations as parents try to give their children the best start in life, the Asian Development Bank said.

Nearly nine out of 10 South Korean elementary pupils have private tutoring, while the figure for primary school children in India's West Bengal state is six out of 10.

"Proportions are lower in other countries, but throughout the region the shadow is spreading and intensifying," the study said, calling for a review of education systems to make such extra teaching less attractive.

Extra academic work is aimed at helping slow learners and supporting high achievers, and is seen by many Asian parents as a constructive way for adolescents to spend their spare time.

However, it can also reduce time for sports and other activities important for well-rounded development, as well as cause social tensions since richer families are able to pay for better-quality tutoring, the study said.

Funny, but are we not suppose to know more of our own interests or what is best for us and our family? Yet these haughty ADB people are saying otherwise...they know more about our children's welfare than us, the parents.

If a family finds that the “one-size-fits-all” educational standards implemented by incumbent institutions has not been sufficient in providing learning services for their children, would it be morally deviant to procure educational services outside of these institutions?

To consider, in the Philippines, nearly 4 out of 10 college graduates are unemployed and one in 10 of graduates go abroad. So how effective has traditional education been? Yet these are the standards which the ADB desires that our children be confined with.

I have to admit I have been a product of tutoring too, as my parents felt the need for me to learn more, when I was in grade school.

Education comes best from the self, as educator John Holt once said,

I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning

This has been true for me, where everyday is a learning day.

I would extend this idea to say that most of my learning came from self education or “deciding what to learn” and from indirect mentorship (Dr. Faber and the Austrian school for instance).

And I think that most of what I learned from contemporary education has been useless and merely went down the drain.

Yet here is what ADB wants to do…

The study called for state supervision and regulation of the industry, as well as a review of Asia's educational systems.

So the ADB wants to control and regulate the education of your children.

The truth of the matter is that they want our children to become worshipers of state.

Again John Holt,

Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves

It may NOT just be the state, which the ADB promotes.

They may have secondary objectives. They may serve as mouthpieces or shills for established educational (politically connected) institutions whom have feeling the heat from online competition and from homeschooling.

The following video are the kind of stuffs which statists (like the ADB) hates:


Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra, in a TED talk, tackles one of the greatest problems of education—the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most.

Some great quotes from Sugata Mitra:

1:41 children will learn to do what they want to learn to do

16:33 Education is a self organising system where learning is an emergent phenomenon

Like John Holt, the message from Mr. Mitra is simple: education is self determined.