17th June 2016 1:00
By Blue Tutors
Prestigious private school Wellington College has recently started conducting all day interviews for applicants to ensure that they see through ‘tutored answers’. The headmaster expressed exasperation at the numbers of children who seem to be repeating ‘tutored answers’ and said that it took 100s of hours of staff time and resources in order to ensure that they were taking the best applicants as opposed to those who had been tutored to give the ‘right answers.’ When asked how best children should prepare for their entrance process, the headmaster said that parents should sack the tutor and spend time talking with their kids about the world around them. Reading this it occurred to me that this is what tutors of younger students should really be doing anyway – so what has made tutoring a dirty word?
The ‘tutoring’ that teachers and head teachers have such a downer on is not what I think of as tutoring at all. What they are objecting to is the relentless hours making kids learn answers by rote, doing practice tests and making them generally miserable – and we should all object to that. Sadly, some tutors are hired because they are prepared to do whatever it takes to get kids into prestigious schools, including tutoring for hours each week and getting their students to memorise answers. The reality is that this approach is less and less likely to be successful, and can very damaging. Ironically, the best tutoring at this age looks similar to the parental interaction described by Wellington College.
The best tutoring doesn’t force kids to learn answers by rote, rather helps them develop the tools they need to approach any problem or idea they are presented with. The best way to do this isn’t with test after test, but to talk about ideas, books, events and other interesting things, and encourage kids to voice their opinions and think critically. Now, parents are perfectly capable of doing this for their children and they should be doing it. However, tutors can offer specialist knowledge in subjects and may also be able to spend more time with their students. This doesn’t mean hours of rote learning, rather ensuring that kids spend a few hours a week engaged in lively and critical conversation.