January 2010

One of the distinctly original sights of Hong Kong are the faces of attractive, smartly dressed young men and women plastered on buses and various billboards. These people are not pop singers or teen idols. They are tutors at hugely popular ‘tutorial centres.’ People generally refer to the tutors as ‘celebrity tutors.’ Here the meanings of ‘tutor’ and ‘tutorial centre’ have been recast. Conventionally a tutorial means a session of intensive tuition given by a tutor to an individual or a small group of students. The efficacy of this pedagogically highly effective arrangement stems from the large amounts of attention a tutor gives an individual. The meaning of ‘tutorial’ in Hong Kong does not mean that. The ‘tutorials’ are lectures with classes of several hundred, with most of the students watching a live video feed, or even a pre-recorded video. There is no interaction at a personal level. Students cannot ask questions nor ask for help with specific problems.
   The pay of the celebrity tutors has nothing in common with most educators either. Local teachers get the modest salaries earned by most educationalists in similar positions around the world. The celebrity tutors’ earning power is more akin to rock stars, sports professionals or property magnates. Some of them trouser about one million Hong Kong dollars (US$129,000) per month, compared with a local mid-grade teacher who earns HK$25,000 (US$3,200). If this is what the tutors get, the mind boggles at the income of the schools. This is evidence enough that the primary purpose of the centres is generating money, not teaching.
   The tutors hardly serve as role models for youngsters, especially when aligned with underpaid, overworked, unappreciated yet mostly diligent and devoted
school teachers. The tutors represent a triumph of slick, superficial, money-grabbing glossiness over real education. So one might wonder why the parents do not take exception to the family’s earning being chucked away on what amounts to nothing more than a zoo where students might take a snooze, have a giggle at the patter, or ogle the attractive, well groomed tutors. The truth is parents do not take much notice of what their students do in their lessons. All parents need to hear from their offspring is that the centre is ‘good,’ and this prompts relief that the extent of parental interest or involvement in the educational process need go no further than coughing up the requisite funding. Rather than being interested in education per se, their main concern is getting one-upmanship.
  The centres cash in on the students’ need for a quick-fix to improve exam results, worship for celebrity culture, and an opportunity to loaf around in front of a video feed without doing any of the work that a real tutorial situation would demand. The centres greatly appeal to parents by facilitating a solution to their challenging and complex predicament of overseeing their kids’ education with a quick and easy patch that entails no more than shelling out the required funds.
   The centres do not dispense knowledge but exam-passing techniques, how to pick which question to answer and how to prioritise in exams, and dishing out model answers, which are often not understood.
   The standard of English in the tutorial centres is often dire. I once saw some classroom handouts given by the self-appointed ‘king of the Queen’s English Shi Sir.’ These notes were a farrago of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and mangled idioms. Indeed when this so-called ‘expert’ on English ended up in court, his first act was to plead inadequacy in English and request an interpreter.
   At least one tutor, Karon Oten Fan Karno, has been prosecuted for publishing misleading claims, showing students examination marking schemes, and collecting students’ personal data. Customs officers also arrested him for infringement of copyright of examination papers.
   The tutors and their centres are just responding to market forces. Students want quick, easy shortcuts to get high marks in exams. The nature of the examination system with its emphasis on rote learning, model answers and memorisation exacerbates this. Students also need entertainment during their lessons, and the young, attractive and well-dressed tutors give good performances.
   The existence of the tutorials represents the inevitable upshot of an ever ready propensity for celebrity and material worship attempting to fill a void created by a dismal education system and the assumption that throwing money at something somehow replaces correct parental nurturing and care. Therefore a parasitic industry blooms that exploits parental worry, over-ambitiousness and the fact that schools and parents are manifestly failing in their jobs. So students flock to these factories which generate unbelievable profits. It’s not education;
just opportunistic cashing in on an obvious failing.
   It is not just the students who suffer from the education system. From 2008 to the end of 2010, there were six teacher suicides. Hapless and beleaguered teachers bear the brunt of parents’ rabid displeasure at the educator who has clearly failed to mould a child of modest academic capability into a potential doctor or lawyer. This teacher often struggles working unusually long hours, tries to cope with impractically large classes, deals with a new syllabus, and has the worry of being laid off. On top of all this, a frequent burden is being saddled with huge amounts of useless, time-consuming administration from the overly-bureaucratic Education and Manpower Commission, and wasting time in futile conferences called by meeting-loving principals whose sole concern is obsessively preening a school’s reputation.
   The celebrity tutors have none of these worries. Their main concern is where to park the Porsche.