The following commentary is in response to the recent news article about Singapore’s rapid increase in tuition services, as well as how the services offered by these centres are becoming more and more flamboyant in their approaches to poach potential students.
It is without a doubt that the situation would spiral to the current stage that it is at due to the nature of the industry which tuition lies in, where there is often little differentiation between the competitors. As such, the only way that good tuition centres can stray away from their rivals is through offering various other add-on services and complimentary goods that will lure parents with deep pockets.
Some of these services including the use of education in real life scenarios as displayed by Mr. Edmund Quek of Economics Café Learning Centre is without doubt useful and rather ingenious. Not only do these techniques help to increase the interest that a child has on the subject, but it is applicable to real life scenarios. However, with all cut-throat competitors out there, lots of meaningless advertising and services are being pumped into the industry, such as offering shuttle buses to fetch students between MRT stations or through “misleading advertisements” meant to cajole parents into sending their kids to these tuition centres. Now there is nothing wrong with differentiating oneself from competition, but to truly saturate the industry with tuition classes at exorbitant prices leading to a misconception in the market that expensively equates to quality tuition classes is nothing but treacherous.
This is especially so when parents from low-income families are too spending their money on their children’s education by sending them to such tuition centres to receive “proper education”. Now, without a doubt, there is nothing wrong with charging a higher price if one has a different teaching method or technique that sparks learning or education. But to charge a higher price simply because one provides a service that is not related to education is a rather shady practice. Now you may think that their advertising of “free complimentary services” means that you’re not paying for it, but someone has to pay for those other complimentary services, and the owner of these centres are definitely not the ones.
Another thing that has caught the attention of many educators is the shortcuts that these tuition centres have employed in order to get their stellar reputation. True, the kids studying at these tuition centres are getting high grades, but at what cost? If teaching to these tutors is through exploiting the questions and teaching students fool proof methods of getting marks instead of focussing on teaching them to learn, it ultimately defeats the main purpose of education in today’s context.
There is always a price to pay when such supplementary/necessity type industries morph into “luxury” type services that only the rich can afford and the poor are struggling to keep up with. It is important that parents don’t lose sight of the true meaning of education, and not get bought into by some of the fancy gimmicks that these tuition centres cater to.