When formal schooling meets private supplementary tutoring: impact of China's neoliberal education reforms

Abstract

Private supplementary tutoring has greatly expanded during the past few decades, and has become a global phenomenon. The expansion of tutoring has contributed to and benefited from its institutionalization in the education sector. Tutoring and formal schooling are interrelated in innumerable ways. Tutoring is commonly referred to as shadow education, since it exists because of the operation of mainstream education, and changes in accordance with its body. In some countries, such as Japan and Singapore, the shadow education system supplements the mainstream education, while in Cambodia and Turkey shadow education sometimes substitutes for formal schooling. In any case, the lines between the two systems are neither straight nor clear. As shadow education has been institutionalized, and as the industry constantly adjusts to changes in schooling and the larger society, the boundaries between the two systems have been increasingly blurred in various forms of public private partnerships. The blurring boundaries can take place as a result of government or school policy initiatives. They can also be created by tutoring providers who operate across the line in both systems. This panel highlights some practices in Japan, Singapore and Mainland China and examines the conceptualization of shadow education. The first three presenters demonstrate the dynamics of the blurring boundaries in the three countries and discuss the implications for mainstream education. The blurring boundaries exist not only in practice but also in the scholarly inquiry on the nature and scale of tutoring. The changing dynamics in practice have increased the difficulty in conceptualizing the already ambiguous term of shadow education. Therefore, the fourth presenter sheds light on the ambiguity or inconsistency among different conceptualizations of shadow education in pursuit of a comprehensive understanding for future research on this topic.