Tanay Sukumar, January 31, 2011

A research on Indian education practices shows that by 2020, an average Indian school-going kid will attend four different tuition classes, apart from school.

The child will get to sleep four hours a day, and will be able to play and enjoy only during vacations. He will spend over 12 hours away from home, and will be bent by an average angle of 4 degrees at the spine due to the constant weight of the schoolbag, the research showed.

In a few years, the tuition system may become a multiple-tier system — a student will attend a tuition master to help with school studies, another to help with the lessons given by the first tuition master, and so on, the research has forecast.

The tuition industry will rise more as parents increasingly believe spending money is the sole way to show they love their child, said the research.

An expert says, “Parents will forget that schools are meant for getting kids taught. They will treat school as a taken-for-granted place like the bathroom, where a kid just has to go everyday. Actual education will take place at private tuition.”

The research results were based on a study done on 1,000 students in New Delhi. “Just as a child must be admitted to a school, he also must be sent to a tuition centre, otherwise neighbours might say the parents don’t want to educate the child,” observed the report.

According to the predictions, the average 13-year-old schoolchild will not be able to understand anything taught by teachers at school, because during classes, he will be busy doing the homework given by his tuition teachers. Twenty minutes during every class are also expected to be spent using the mobile phone, and bullying the teacher.