Shadow education as protest: Expansion of private tutoring and diversity of government responses

• In Event: Protest and Social Change

Proposal

Recent decades have brought much expansion of the so-called shadow education system of private supplementary tutoring. This paper, in line with the conference theme, analyses patterns through the lens of protest. The development of shadow education cannot be described as protest in the form of strikes and street-level public demonstrations, but it clearly reflects dissatisfaction with public and even private schooling. Parents who send their children for supplementary tutoring are in effect stating that “Schooling is not enough” in quantity and/or quality.

The question then is how education authorities respond to this protest. Three major categories are identified:

1. Laissez Faire. The families protest by sending their children for tutoring, but the government ignores it. [Perhaps secretly, the government likes the pattern because the tutoring helps to bridge gaps in schooling provision.] Examples: Malawi, Senegal, Yemen

2. Paternalism. The families protest, and the government allows them to do so. In a paternal way, the authorities introduce regulations to protect them from manipulation by tutoring providers. Examples: Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Qatar

3. Suppression. The families protest, and the government tells them (with benign vocabularies) that they have no right to do that. It suppresses the tutoring sector. Examples: South Korea during the 1980s; Sharqia Governorate in Egypt in 2015; China since 2021.

Within the broad theme of this conference, the analysis can provide insights into passive protest as well as more obviously active interventions. In the second and third categories, families do not always heed regulations. Thus, they may for example still employ unlicensed tutors and teachers who are officially not allowed to offer private tutoring; and South Korea during the 1980s much tutoring went underground – a pattern that has been echoed in contemporary China. Further, the South Korean prohibitions of tutoring had to be abandoned in 2000 when the law courts declared them unconstitutional – i.e. an infringement of parental rights to secure tutoring for their children should they desire to do so. The dictates in Egypt’s Sharqia Governorate were also abandoned in the face of protests from both tutors and parents. Additional variations around the world reveal multiple complexities that make the theme a fruitful avenue for further exploration.

Author

• Mark Bray, University of Hong Kong