（A1那年灵感来自个人经历的社会学research project，如今看来固然有黑历史的成分但依旧十分relevant。不可否认随着未成年人权益意识的觉醒，培训机构树立“形象代言人”的现象有所改观，但内卷与恶性竞争的“魂”还是老样子。有一定程度的修改，毕竟没正经学过social research的十七岁小屁孩的文笔有些地方实在稚嫩得没眼看，但当年在复习国际考的夹缝中爆肝写了将近五千词平心而论还是挺了不起的，对改变教育现状的热忱可见一斑。某种意义上又臭又长，感谢每一位愿意耐心读完的朋友。PS：鬼知道当时为了整interview我脱了几层皮，以及我承认某些data有添油加醋的成分。PPS：这篇report和后来的presentation加起来老师给了80分。PPPS：没错，整个高中最后悔的事莫过于没把这篇东西改改当做EPQ交上去，没有之一。）
Encouragement or Exploitation? The Case of “Academic Superstars”
This article addresses the phenomenon of tutoring institutions, in the hope of advertising themselves, presenting their most talented students to the public in the same way agencies promote starlets. It also investigates the effects this practice has, be them short-term or long-term, on the students and people around them.
Background
Tutoring institutions themselves are part of the fruits of marketization of education. The forms of outside-school tutoring differ from country to country: In many European countries such as Britain, tutors are often individuals who deliver lessons at students’ homes, many of them being schoolteachers who do tutoring as a part-time job. In a lot of Asian countries such as China, on the other hand, fostered by intense competition, a general thirst for better education and a fast-developing economy which means that more and more people are able to afford tutoring for their children, tutoring usually exists in the form of company-owned institutions with full-time employed teachers which swarm with students after school and on weekends.
Intense competition exists not only among students but also among those institutions; the more students they receive, the more money they earn and the more well-known among potential students and parents they become. Advertisements come in various forms, ranging from common ones like posters and pamphlets to not-so-common ones such as press conferences, discussion seminars and speeches. The focuses of those activities are neither guest speakers nor tutors from the institutions, but students, some of whom having not yet graduated from elementary school. They are the most outstanding students, some excelling in English, others in math, the rest in other various aspects, almost all laced with commendations, trophies, and letters of acceptance from the best middle schools, high schools or universities. They are selected by hand by the institutions to perform such tasks and promote themselves to the public in the name of the institutions who sponsor them in return, usually in the form of signing a contract which offers them scholarships so that they could attend their lessons for free. In other words, these talented young people are made into “academic superstars”. By doing so they, along with all their glories and honors, become part of the institutions’ tools of marketing.
I myself had been there, at the tender age of eleven, under the spotlight. As I look back now, seven years after being talked into signing that contract, despite having gone through more than many people could imagine, I find it difficult to either easily describe that experience or categorize it as having a positive or negative influence on my process of growing up. I find it almost impossible to define this practice, on my own, as either a form of encouragement on the students which builds their self-esteem and prepares them for future presentations and other challenges, or exploitation wearing a blatant disguise, shamelessly manipulating talented youngsters for the sake of money and fame.
This is one of the main reasons I choose to conduct this research.
Aims
The primary aim of this research is to find out the opinions of people involved in this practice on tutoring institutions promoting their talented students to the public in order to advertise themselves, and see whether it is considered more as a positive or negative practice. Another aim is to investigate the effects this practice has, if any, on those directly involved (students, teachers, etc.)
Literature review
News reports and testimonies related to “speakers” or “honorary representatives” tend to be limited to areas unrelated to education, most of those featured being actors or entertainers. So far, little or no research has been done on this practice of tutoring institutions, despite its apparent similarities with practices in the entertainment industry. During this process it has been found very difficult, if at all possible, to refer to previous researches or rely on sufficient preexisting information. However, there have been studies on marketization of education as a broader topic. As Natale and Doran pointed out, “The marketing of education has become epidemic.” [1]
Method
The research method chosen is semi-structured interview; a number of questions were written up yet the interviewees were allowed to talk about anything they felt like sharing. This is to ensure that while the procedure is standardized, data-rich information that had not been thought about could still be collected.
Volunteer sampling was used; potential participants, ranging from former teachers of mine to former fellow students from the tutoring institution I was in, were contacted individually and those who agree to participate in the research were interviewed. Consent was given and the participants were secure in the knowledge that they could withdraw their information from the study at any time. The sample consists of five participants, three of them being former fellow students (Florence, Howard and Samuel) and two being former/current teachers at the tutoring institution I attended (Lucy and Bertha).
Results
(1) Florence and Howard
Florence is three years younger than me and had immigrated with her family to the United States approximately five years ago. Howard is the same age as me but one year ahead of me since one of the best middle schools in my city accepted him one year before he finished elementary school because of his outstanding mathematics and English results. I put the two of them together since most of the time they appeared on stage together back when we were all “academic superstars”, all having received top prizes in national English competitions. Both of them started attending lessons at that institution in 2012; Florence terminated her contract and left in 2013, Howard in 2014. Neither of them could make it to a face-to-face interview, so interviews were conducted online.
Florence was extremely eager to tell me her experiences even before any questions were asked. She recounted her excitement when she heard that such an opportunity had been given to her and the fulfillment that washed over her each time she stood under the spotlight (“I was so glad that so many people were interested in my story and respected me enough to hear them out......I was so young and that was the best thing I could have imagined at that age.”)
When asked whether advertising a tutoring institution had affected her relationship with her fellow schoolmates, Florence was a bit surprised. “Why, no! I sometimes even invited my friends over to the institution to listen to me share my experiences......it was, like, a nice kind of envy. Like they felt genuinely happy for me.” In response to the question “Do you think this practice has more of a positive influence or a negative one? Why?”, she clearly expressed her approval of such practices: “Oh why would anyone classify it as negative?......It had definitely been one of the sweetest experiences of my childhood.”
Howard on the other hand was more cool-headed and said little more than what the questions asked. However, it should be noted that he and Florence expressed mostly the same views towards once having been the center of attention at a young age: that they could never express their gratitude and happiness enough for being able to share their experience and success with others under such attention. When asked “Do you think this practice has more of a positive influence or a negative one? Why?”, Howard responded: “I’d say positive, ’cause no matter in which way, on-stage or off-stage, as an elementary school student or maybe someone older......by sharing your experience on those competitions......you offer other people advice; you help others, and helping others feels good.”
(2) Samuel
Having participated in the same competitions and currently attending the same high school with me, Samuel is perhaps one of the few “coworkers” whom I would use the word familiar on. He and I both started attending lessons at that institution in 2012 and both left in 2015; the only difference was that my contract terminated in 2014 and his one year earlier, in 2013. As soon as the conversation steered towards details of his experience Samuel began to come out from his slightly reserved state and express his feelings more openly.
When asked “What did the institution offer you and what did they say they expect from you?”, Samuel responded that “they just gave me the same things they gave you, a scholarship, and in this way they got us into taking pictures for them, working for them, speaking on behalf of them......Makes no sense when you think back”. He stated that what made him accept the offer was that “everyone wants free things and free lessons also count as free things”. Samuel claimed to have attended “at least fifteen” seminars and/or speeches, either as main or additional speaker.
When I asked Samuel whether he had faced the same plight I had, which was to come up with a rational explanation when my classmates confronted me with why I was promoting a tutoring institution all of them hated, Samuel appeared visibly upset: “It was bad enough that all my teachers in the institution all knew about me and occasionally made a comment or two, and my worst fear was to let them [his schoolmates] see those notebooks and pamphlets with my photo on it......It was traumatic, it was and still is.” When being asked about his feelings and opinions towards such events and such practices, he remarked that he had no idea what the seminars “are good for except for fostering jealousy among us students making you paranoid of potential bullying”.
What is particularly worth noting was Samuel’s remark regarding the question “How was the audience’s reaction towards you”, to which he commented: “I felt like I were in a zoo. I felt like a monkey.”
(3) Lucy
The highlight of my interviews was the one with Lucy, my English teacher back when I took lessons at the tutoring institution in which she started working in 2009. During the two years when I was chosen as a talented student to take part in the seminars she helped me by directing me to say what there was to say and to answer questions from the audience. After five years working in that institution Lucy quit and started her own one, but we have always kept in touch and a kind of mutual trust still remained between me and her. Lucy’s opinions are particularly important to me since she had worked with not only me, but a great number of students in this way and knows first-hand what this practice is like.
I interviewed Lucy at her place. The practice of using students to promote the institution, she stated, is not something new. Since the birth of the institution there have been various activities involving students and promotion at the same time, for example charity work with a film crew photoing and recording everything so that they could later be put on display.
I asked Lucy the question “Approximately how many students, how many ‘academic superstars’, have you come in contact with? Are there anyone who left you a particularly deep impression?”. Lucy replied that she “can’t remember, it’s just too big a number......but talking about deep impression, there is this girl I’ve taught whom I found hard to forget. I remember at first I wasn’t even willing to accept her into my class because I thought she was incapable, and then her mother went to the headquarters [of the institution] and pleaded......so I took her in. And she didn’t let me down - she was brilliant in all her competitions and was also excellent in presenting herself at the seminars when she was later chosen as an ‘academic superstar’, if that’s what you prefer to call them.....” When asked about what she thought students’ feelings and opinions were towards such events and such practices, Lucy stated that she believed “they absolutely enjoyed it......I mean, they were young and it was really an honor for them to be the center of attention and hold seminars which were usually limited to adults - they enjoyed it a lot and their parents also did because they were very proud to see their children like that.”
The next question I asked was “How many and what kind of people usually attend those events? As far as you know, what are their feelings and opinions towards such events and such practices?”. Lucy explained that it “depends on the venue.......I remember once we hosted it in a really large auditorium and more than 300 people came. And those who come are usually parents who are pretty stressed who only get more stressed after the seminars......they really want their children to get into good schools and achieve good results in competitions.”
Since Lucy had worked in a renowned institution for a few years and knows first-hand how to use students to run discussion seminars, I also made sure I asked whether she would use the same method to promote her own institution. She remarked: “Well, actually, since now technology has developed further and many things could be done online there is sometimes no need for seminars......I sometimes invite my current and former students over to share, but you must remember that there is a fundamental difference between this kind of sharing and that kind of sharing. Back then the main goal of those events was to promote themselves, but now when I invite students over I genuinely want them to share their knowledge and experience with other students and parents. I do the same thing in a different way and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
Lucy described her view on this practice as “Absolutely positive, it works as a strong encouragement for intelligent kids and their parents, and it’s a good activity to share their experience and their effort. Before they might do speeches just for competitions, so this serves as a whole new experience for them. It adds power to their words. We all ought to do something fore society, and this practice teaches those kids, at such a young age, how it feels to inspire other students and parents and kindle their interest in public speaking and English as a whole......passing on something powerful to the entire society.”
(4) Bertha
Bertha was one of Lucy’s coworkers at the tutoring institution. Lucy quit while Bertha did not; she is currently still teaching English there. The interview was conducted online, and lasted for about ten minutes, the shortest one I conducted in this study. Bertha claimed that she had not led any “academic superstar” onto the stage because she “didn’t want to”, but that she had “indeed taught some of them” and “gotta admit that most of them did enjoy being made superstars”. She described the parents attending the speeches and seminars as “reeking with anxiety and want their children to be good at pretty much everything......They come anxious and leave a million times more anxious and would sign up for any courses the institution tried to sell, which is pretty much exactly what they want I guess”.
When asked whether these practices had somehow affected her view on certain aspects concerning education, tutoring institutions, advertisement or society as a whole, Bertha openly expressed how she had been shocked and disappointed by the magnitude of this practice held by institutions that are meant for education, regardless of their extracurricular nature. “It’s just shocking - I used to have the slightest hope that maybe they [these tutoring institutions] still have the conscience to not think about profit all the time but I was wrong.....they basically do the same things entertainment industries would do with innocent kids who actually think they’ve became superstars while in fact they’ve fallen into this bubble made especially for them so that they’ll do anything the institution ask them to do. It’s basically maltreatment of minors in my view, exploiting them like that.”
Findings
Three participants (two students and one teacher) gave a generally positive feedback of the practice of tutoring institutions promoting themselves using talented students, using concepts such as gratitude, unique experience, inspiring others and achieving personal value. The other two participants (one student and one teacher) on the other hand gave a negative feedback, describing it as being distressing, disappointing, shocking and even traumatic. Interestingly, of the two teachers I interviewed (both having been respected and experienced English teachers at the institution in question), one gave the most positive feedback while the other fell on the other far end of the spectrum: the key word in Lucy’s transcript was “encouragement” while in Bertha’s it was “exploitation”.
It needs to be mentioned that the findings were somehow surprising. While I had expected more complaints than praise, it turned out that three out of five participants (60%) had reported their experiences related to this practice as being positive. Also, it should be noted that while the positive views often focus on the experience itself (being the center of attention, sharing stories with other students and parents), the negative views tend to stress on the nature of those experiences (working for a tutoring institution for promotion’s sake, exposing oneself to the public at a young age). Therefore, it can be inferred that although some of the participants may not differ much in their circumstances (the experience of the students had a lot in common, so did the teachers’), their prospective of viewing this practice, which could be determined by knowledge and experiences gained from other various aspects of life, may be the reason why their opinions vary so much from one another.
Reflections on researcher’s position
For two years I had, being called a child prodigy for my performance in Chinese and English, been spending my free time jumping from seminar to seminar; this practice had undoubtedly taken a large chunk of my late childhood and early adolescent years, a time when young minds are known to be extremely sensitive and easily marked for life. I enjoyed wholeheartedly the first year of my contract, when I was eleven and was wrapping up my final year of elementary school, preparing for my middle school entrance exams. Working side by side with Lucy, I navigated my way through different spotlights in different halls of different branches of the same institution, telling different people the same old story about how I loved English and how I got all those trophies on my shelf. I took a lot of pride in them and waited every day for Lucy to call me and summon me to the next seminar, which, looking back, was actually rather frequent considering that I was only eleven.
Yet when I started Year 7, into the second year of my contract, my grades began to slip once I passed the exam and got into one of the best middle schools in my city. Although I still hopped my way through seminars and told the same old story over and over again, I stopped experiencing the same fulfillment I did before. I felt torn apart since while I was failing my exams at school during the day, here I am after sunset to work for this institution and tell people about my success. I felt exhausted. I felt manipulated. I felt torn apart inside. Also, the conferences usually ended rather late so it was not the most uncommon thing in the world for me to stay up until the early hours of the morning to do my homework; yet obviously the institution did not care about that. My grades slipped even more and the vicious cycle carried on. Words cannot express how glad I was when my contract finally terminated.
Seven years after I signed my contract, I decide to carry out this research not only because I suspect that contract to be the beginning of my depression episode and wish to investigate the underlying problems of this practice, but also because I am curious of how people who had been on the same boat with me feel and think about this practice which lifted them to the highs without teaching them how to face the lows. The reason I carried out this research, hence, is not only to find out whether this practice is positive or negative, but also how it punctuates people’s lives, be them students or teachers.
Discussion
Five semi-structured interviews were carried out on five participants recruited using volunteer sampling, in order to investigate people’s feelings and opinions on tutoring institutions using talented students to promote themselves and the effects this practice has on people related to it.
The positive aspects of this research include that it has relatively high internal validity since it has a large number of questions to ask the participants (14 for Lucy, 11 for Bertha and 12 for the students). Since semi-structured interview was used, qualitative data was collected, further increasing the validity of the results since while the replies were operationalized to a certain degree by the questions, the participants were still allow to talk freely, enabling the researcher to collect data that might not have been collected if quantitative methods or structured interviews were used. Also, ethical issues were avoided since a statement was read out to the participants at the beginning of each research (see Appendix).
However, some of the flaws of the research include that the sample size is too small. With only five participants, populational validity is low because it is difficult to generalize the results to the public. Also, internal reliability is also low since it is unlikely for the researcher to get exactly the same answers had the questions been asked again. It is also impossible to avoid researcher’s bias since the questions unavoidably carry the researcher’s personal opinions which would more or less affect the participants’ replies. Furthermore, since the researcher has a noticeably strong opinion towards this topic, this research has the tendency to center the participants around the researcher and making them tools of interpreting the researcher’s opinions instead of individual speakers.
In order to improve this research, the sample size could be larger, and relatively neutral questions should be used instead of opinion-carrying ones. Also, it is very important that the researcher does not lure the participants into saying what they wishes them to say.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Lucy for helping and supporting me during my own experience and for agreeing to my interview request, providing me with vital information. Thanks to Bertha for taking the risk and accepting my interview. Thanks to Bertha, Florence, Howard and Samuel for sharing their experience and feelings with me. I am deeply indebted to my sociology teacher for providing valuable instructions on conducting this research.
Appendix
(1) Statement at beginning of interview
You are participating in a sociological research on the practice of tutoring institutions advertising themselves using public performances of their most talented students. The aim of this research is to find out the opinions of people involved in this practice and see whether it is considered more as a positive or negative one. Another aim is to investigate the effects this practice has, if any, on those directly involved, for example students, teachers or parents. By agreeing to this interview, you have informed the researcher with your consent, and that you understand the aims of the study and the rights you have. You have the right to answer or refuse to answer any of these questions. A pseudonym would be given to you when the results are published but you have the right to withdraw your data at any time. All information is confidential. Do you have any questions?
(2) Questions for Lucy’s and Bertha’s interview
1. Which year did you start working in that institution? Which year, as far as you know, did such events start there? Whose idea was it? How and by whom were they organized?
2. Approximately how many students, how many “academic superstars”, have you come in contact with? Are there anyone who left you a particularly deep impression? If so, can you talk about them?
3. What, as far as you know, were the students’ feelings and opinions towards such events and such practices?
4. Approximately how many parents of those “academic superstars” have you come in contact with? Are there anyone who left you a particularly deep impression? If so, can you talk about them?
5. What, as far as you know, were the parents’ feelings and opinions towards such events and such practices?
6. What, as far as you know, were your fellow teachers’ feelings and opinions towards such events and such practices?
7. How many and what kind of people usually attend those events? As far as you know, what are their feelings and opinions towards such events and such practices?
8. Do you know any other institutions that carry out similar practices? If you do, how are they same or different?
9. Do you think the effects of those practices, if any, are exactly what the institutions want in the first place?
10. Are you using similar methods to promote your current institution? If you are, why? If not, why and will you in the future? (Lucy’s interview)
11. Have these practices somehow affected your view on certain aspects concerning education, tutoring institutions, advertisements or society as a whole?
12. Do you think this practice has more of a positive influence or a negative one? Why?
(3) Questions for Florence’s, Howard’s and Samuel’s interview
1. Which year did you start attending lessons in that tutoring institution? How many years did you spend there in total?
2. Which year and how soon were you made an “academic superstar”? How many years had you been one? What had you done to earn it?
3. What did the institution offer you and what did they say they expect from you? What made you accept the offer?
4. Approximately how many seminars or speeches have you attended?
5. How many and what kind of people usually attend those events? How was the audience’s reaction towards you, especially if you had not yet graduated from elementary school at that time?
6.What were your parents’ feelings and opinions towards such practices?
7. Did your schoolteachers or schoolmates know that you were working to promote a tutoring institution (which some of them may also attend)? What was their reaction? As far as you know, what were their feelings and opinions towards such practices?
8. Had your teachers in the same institution treated you differently because you were an “academic superstar”? If yes, how?
9. Had these practices affected your normal life, e.g. schoolwork or social life? If they had, how?
10. Have these practices somehow affected your view on certain aspects concerning education, tutoring institutions, advertisements, child development or society as a whole?
11. What are your feelings and opinions towards such events and such practices? How do you feel about having once been an “academic superstar”? If you could go back in time, would you make the same decision? Why?
12. Do you think this practice has more of a positive influence or a negative one? Why?
References
[1] Natale, S.M. and Doran, C. (2012). Marketization of education: An ethical dilemma. Journal of business ethics, 105(2), pp.187–196.
