Opinion | Instead of bailing out Hong Kong’s greedy tuition centres, spend more on improving education
- Tuition centres are of questionable benefit to society and propping them up mainly benefits landlords. If the government’s focus is on education, why not spend instead to improve the lot of schoolchildren, especially those from lower-income families?
Tuition centres are run for profit by businesspeople, not educators. Professional educators are the enemy of the profiteer owners because they cost money. Tutorial centres profit from economies of scale, where customers pay for mass-produced merchandise – in this case, classes.
The “manufacturers” are the teachers, and it is in the tuition centres’ interest to employ the cheapest teachers possible. Of course, this usually means they are unqualified. This is especially true in Hong Kong because of the exorbitant rents.
The exceptions are usually found in centres that cater to the upper classes. They can afford to pay more and employ better teachers because they can charge more. But this is not the case for most tuition centres, and not even for some of the pricier ones, where the cheaper programmes are concerned.
They trumpet the qualifications of their “consultants and coordinators” for the upper echelon programmes but waltz around the subject of teacher qualifications for the low-end programmes for the masses, usually using the catch-all “experienced” and/or “qualified”.
