THE GOVERNMENT at last says it wants to tackle the issue of private lessons, the bane of parents and children alike, eating away at both family time and budgets as pupils desperately try to make the grade at school and ahead of university.
The problem is so widespread as to have become an industry, with institutes springing up all over Cyprus, and many teachers (illegally) making more money out of hours than they do while teaching at state schools. It has an impact on family finances, on the traffic and environment, and on children themselves, who are deprived of important leisure time as they run from school straight into an afternoon packed with private lessons.
While the government’s statement of intent is to be welcomed, one wonders whether the Education Ministry really knows what it would take to eradicate the problem.
There has been talk of tackling the question of state school teachers giving lessons in the afternoon in breach of the terms of their employment. That would certainly strangle some of the supply of teachers to the circuit, though there are plenty in the private sector with nothing stopping them from picking up the slack.
What’s more it would be dealing more with the symptom than the substance of the problem. Yes, there may be a minority of unscrupulous teachers who deliberately under-teach the syllabus in the morning in order to pick up extra lessons in the afternoon from children desperate to pass the course. If there is no money to be made from extra lessons, there is no reason for those teachers not to do their utmost in the classroom.
But it is not the handful of crooked teachers who are driving the industry. What the Education Ministry should be looking at as the fundamental issue of teaching at state schools. If children need extra lessons to pass their exams, then there are only too possibilities: either the exams are too difficult, or the standard of teaching is not up to scratch; there is no third option.
So what the government needs to do is to undertake a twin approach, on the one hand re-examining the curriculum (this is necessary in any case, with many elements being simply outdated), and on the other looking at teacher recruitment, training, and continuous assessment.
On the latter, the current system of automatic appointments from a list, rather than by individual recruitment and interview for every vacancy, is as archaic as it is unacceptable. Children deserve the best teachers available on the market, rather than someone who passed a degree a decade ago and may since have gone into totally unrelated employment.
If the teachers are good, and the syllabus is balanced, there will be no need for private lessons. That is what the government must understand.
