To more than one tutoring institution,
I consider myself a good writer as I seldom find myself at a loss for words, yet penning this letter has proven to be a struggle, since I am aghast and almost depressed at your repeated blatant attempts of defamation towards not only particular schools but also the international school community in general, and also the increasingly apparent tendency of you talking students into quitting school to study full-time at your place, to the point that I did not know where to start my rebuttal. Yet for the sake of displaying your hypocrisy before your eyes, and in a likely futile attempt to address disturbing current trends in the field of international education, I shall try anyway.
As a semi-recent graduate from an A Level curriculum high school, I had considered you, tutoring institutions specialising in international curricula, as allies. I had assumed that you, as entrepreneurs, established your enterprises not only for profit but also with the futures of your students in the equation. I had assumed that you, as providers of the “outstanding education” you have claimed in your advertisements, genuinely devoted yourselves to the passing down of knowledge in whatever subjects you deliver. I had assumed that you, as teachers and administrators, would advise your students on the best steps they ought to take to obtain what they deserve. Most importantly, and most naively, I had assumed that you, as educators, would consider yourselves to be on the same boat as other educators, and regard fellow tutoring institutions and international schools with respect and compassion, for their fortunes and misfortunes today may well be your own tomorrow. Yet within your attitudes towards fellow schools and institutions I saw anything but respect and compassion. Both you and I know that there are good days and bad days, and that the same applies to people, schools, nations, and countless others. When a fellow international school, one that delivers the same curriculum you do and carries the hope of the same young people that dwell in your classrooms, runs into a bad day, your reaction moves beyond the realm of disappointment to the point of cruelty. Instead of support you show disdain, instead of truth you spread rumours, instead of being concerned about your own fate you are gloating, and instead of living up as educators you fail to simply live up as human beings. An ugly yet undeniable picture formed in my head of you writing on the whiteboard day in and day out, pretending to be the virtuous cultivator of minds, while lurking backstage trying all your might to ruin the reputations of international schools, your “competitors” as they turned out to be, one by one. When the same thing happens for the second, third, and fourth time, when your nastiness extends beyond targeting individual schools to insulting the community as a whole, it was not anger but humiliation that caused my heart to swell; after all, I must not have been the only international school student that had regarded you as allies.
I do not need to be a genius to decipher that profit is what drives you in this case. It is not difficult to infer that by slandering the international school community with your unrelenting efforts you are turning away prospective students and parents, and by turning them away from schools you are turning them towards tutoring institutions like yourselves. The more negative connotations you associate with international schools, the more students you receive and the more money you get to put into your pocket. Here we have a simple equation derived from a scenario in education, yet the one element that is missing in this equation is precisely education itself. There do not just happen to be two words for the same act of teaching students in classrooms: what schools provide is education, while what you provide is tutoring. In schools we take classes, join clubs, play basketball matches, make fun of each other in cafeterias, organise charity fairs, give speeches in front of the auditorium, watch the flag rise alongside the anthem, and actually live a life. In tutoring institutions like your own, even the mere act of “taking classes” is disintegrated into monotonous repetitions of input and output, cramming and binge-doing homework. It may be true that this learning style has its values and may prove necessary for certain individuals, but like ice creams and cakes can only be affiliated to main courses, tutoring institutions can only exist as a supplement to school education, and never its counterpart or, worse still, its replacement. After all, one cannot live on desserts; after all, one does not even need to have a teaching certificate to teach at a tutoring institution, making it questionable the quality of teaching alone, not to mention any other aspect, of such institutions. That you are turning promising young people of this country away from their schools to become full-time students at your institutions makes clear the fact that the mere presence of the word “Education” in the names of many of you is a lie in itself, and along with this nullifies most if not all of your promises to students and parents. They expected sincerity, integrity, and a genuine quest for knowledge, not hypocrisy, malice, and placing profit before the future of the next generation.
Your deeds, unfortunately, are not the only sins committed by many so-called “international educators” these days that I am sadly aware of. Over the years I have learned about the bigotry towards rival schools, deception of students and parents, vicious competitions detrimental to the very nature of international education, and practices that may well be considered as severe academic dishonesty. While you have every cause to argue that what you are doing is merely what the market urges you to, it does not pardon you from being guilty of lying, as you have violated your written promise towards students and parents that there shall be a high-quality education, your unwritten promise towards the international school community that there shall be mutual respect, and the promise you may or may not have written towards Education with a capital E that you shall practice it with honour and responsibility, not just profit and efficiency. While I do not expect you to have your conscience back anytime soon, I do wish that my words do at least sting you a bit the next time you coax a student into quitting school, or decide to finger-point at some random school and hope their students abandon it and come to you. Even a change this slight is welcomed, since in that case this letter would not have been wasted; there are still going to be a couple of years before I graduate from university and work as an educator, and before then, I do hope the riffraff would clean up itself somewhat.
Sincerely yours,
A concerned student
5 May 2023
