Need for tuition points to ineffective teaching or learning disability

The letter “Tuition fever could worsen plight of disadvantaged kids” (July 15) stated: “Some teachers would start giving tougher tutorial questions without spending time on the fundamentals, since many pupils would have learnt on their own.”

This is already a practice, but only parents whose children do not have tuition experience this. The quality of teaching seems to have gone down compared with five years ago, and this will continue.

Teachers’ levels of commitment and teaching can be gauged if we consider the scores obtained by pupils who do not get outside help in learning. Teachers seem to be relying on pupils having tuition or on parents teaching them.

It seems some teachers’ current approach is to ask their pupils to finish a new chapter, and they would go through the mistakes made. The essence of learning is missing, with either tuition or parents helping pupils grasp a topic.

Tuition is flourishing because it helps in getting better scores. Pupils who go for tuition are not aiming for the highest score or 95 per cent and above; rather, it has become more of a necessity to avoid low marks.

Only children with a learning disability should seek support outside school. Why is tuition needed if we send our children to school, where they are taught for six hours a day?

If a child needs extra help via tuition, there can be only two reasons: The school’s teaching is ineffective or the child has a learning disability.