Extending the Comparisons of Shadow Education and Its Nexus With Schooling

In November 2021, the Centre for International Research in Supplementary Tutoring (CIRIST), which operates under the umbrella of the Institute of Curriculum and Instruction (ICI) at East China Normal University (ECNU), hosted a major international conference. Its theme was “Comparing Curriculum and Instruction Inside and Outside Schools: Policies and Practices.” In China, outside-school instruction, and in particular private supplementary tutoring organized by commercial companies, was much in the public eye a result of its rapid growth during the previous three decades (Zhang & Bray, 2021) and a July 2021 national-government policy aiming at sharp contraction of the sector (Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, 2021). The conference operated in hybrid offline and online modes. Offline attendance was still restricted by the pandemic, though 150 participants were still able to meet on the ECNU campus. More dramatically, the online provision attracted over 200,000 viewers of live and recorded sessions. In addition, the event received extensive media coverage, through which core messages were delivered to over a million people. Most of this coverage was in Chinese, though some sessions and commentaries were in English.

The present collection of papers, the majority of which are based on presentations during the conference, builds on the event. Since many of the China-focused presentations will be published elsewhere, this collection focuses on other parts of the world. The ECNU Review of Education has already published two Special Issues on private supplementary tutoring (Christensen & Zhang, 2021; Zhang & Bray, 2019), so this third Special Issue takes discussions further on the theme.

Concepts and parameters

The title of this Special Issue, like its Nordic-focused predecessor (Christensen & Zhang, 2021), refers to shadow education. This is a widely-used metaphor for various forms of private supplementary tutoring. The first global study employing the metaphor (Bray, 1999) suggested that it is appropriate in several ways (p. 17):

First, private supplementary tutoring only exists because mainstream education exists; second, as the size and shape of the mainstream change, so do the size and shape of supplementary tutoring; third, in almost all societies much more attention focuses on the mainstream than on its shadow; and fourth, the features of the shadow system are much less distinct than those of the mainstream.

The book then proceeded (pp. 21–22) to the parameters of private supplementary tutoring on which it focused, stressing:

• supplementation: tutoring which covers subjects already covered in school, and excluding for example language classes for minority children whose families are anxious that new generations retain competence in languages not taught in mainstream schools;

• privateness: tutoring provided in exchange for a fee, mainly by entrepreneurs and individuals seeking profit; and

• forms: instruction provided one-to-one, in small groups, in large classes, or even in huge lecture theatres with video screens to cater for overflows.

These parameters have been followed by the contributors to this Special Issue, though some extension and blurring is appropriate. Thus, recent times have brought technological developments that permit forms of tutoring not envisaged in earlier decades; and while Bray's (1999) book focused on academic tutoring in mathematics, languages, sciences, etc., families also invest in non-academic tutoring for chess, ballet, music, etc., in order to expand their children's cultural capital alongside their cognitive capital. Also, while the shadow education metaphor has appeal, it cannot be applied rigidly. Thus, some outside-school tutoring is provided ahead of in-school lessons rather than after, raising the question which activity is shadowing which; and while much of the tutoring curriculum does mimic that of the mainstream, some components of the supplementary sector extend beyond schooling as forms of enrichment (Zhang & Bray, 2020).

Papers in this Special Issue

With the above framework in mind, this Guest Editorial Introduction now turns to the papers in the present collection, commencing with the contribution by Bae and Choi (2024) on the Republic of Korea (ROK). Readers will find in this paper detailed historical analysis of Korean patterns over the decades. ROK is known internationally for what Seth (2002) described as its “education fever.” Shadow education first emerged as a significant component of this fever during the 1950s. Compared with later eras it was modest in scale, but even at that time it was controversial because of the academic and financial pressures that it brought to students and families (Bray, 2009, pp. 48–49). Government policies to address the negative dimensions of shadow education led in 1980 to a prohibition of the sector. The strategy proved ineffective, however. Private tutoring initially moved underground and then gradually emerged again. Finally the policy had to be abandoned because in 2000 it was declared unconstitutional on the grounds that students have the right to receive extra tutoring and families have the right to pay for it (Lee et al., 2010).

Bae and Choi recount how government policies since that time have recognized that shadow education will be ongoing, but have sought to reduce demand by promoting the quality of public education. However, shadow education remained “unshrinkable,” in a model that sends salutary signals to other countries. Their overall message is that demand is driven not so much by defective public schooling as by social dynamics. Indeed ROK has one of the strongest school systems in the world as assessed for example by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2014). Yet families still feel the need to invest in shadow education, in part because it is now an established routine and part of the culture (Exley, 2022), and in part because they have aspirations for further social advance or at least consolidation of existing social status (Hultberg et al., 2021). Various government initiatives have sought to reduce demand for shadow education by improving further the quality of schooling, but shadow education remains vigorous (Lee et al., 2022). Yet whereas in the past shadow education operated as a significant vehicle for social mobility, Bae and Choi demonstrate that it now mainly acts as a glass floor to protect the status of the middle classes.

In contrast to the focus by Bae and Choi on a single country, Bray and Hajar (2024) focus on the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), i.e. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These countries have a spread of population sizes from 34.7 million in Saudi Arabia to 1.7 million in Bahrain. They have all been transformed in recent decades by oil wealth, but that has not meant that their education systems necessarily have high quality. The paper exposes many complexities within and among the countries.

Compared with ROK, shadow education in these countries has received much less attention in the research literature. The article shows commonalities and diversities within these groups, employing multilevel analysis from the perspectives of world regions, countries, subnational units of government, and institutions. The article notes that shadow education received official attention in Kuwait in the 1960s, i.e., only a decade after the similar moves in ROK, and had also become prominent in that era in Saudi Arabia. In the other countries, shadow education only became a prominent issue in subsequent decades, but by the 1990s it was clearly an agenda item in Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar. The paper documents diversity in policies concerning shadow education provided by serving teachers and by tutorial centers. Among measures to protect schools from shadow education provision have been regulations in Bahrain and Oman to prohibit serving teachers from offering private tutoring. In Qatar and Saudi Arabia serving teachers in public schools are permitted to offer tutoring in school-supervised arrangements, while patterns in Kuwait and the UAE have been more ambiguous. The paper also notes the implications of the short-term and long-term immigration to the countries that brings diversity of cultures for shadow education and other domains (see also Bray & Hajar, 2023).

The next paper (Bhorkar, 2024) focuses on one of the 28 states in India, which has overtaken China to become the most populated country in the world. Maharashtra has a population of 124.9 million, and is thus much larger than ROK (51.7 million) and completely dwarfs the GCC countries. The decentralized nature of governance in India gives considerable power to the state-level authorities, and means for example that regulations for shadow education, and the politics surrounding those regulations, are to some extent distinctive in each state. Bhorkar's focus is on what she calls the complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive roles of private tutoring in relation to mainstream schooling. In the first three of these roles, the school is taken as dominant and the tutoring works in conjunction with it, but in the substitutive role the tutoring may actually displace schooling. Bhorkar points out that delineation of these four roles of private tutoring and the resulting relationships between tutoring and schooling offers more fine-grained insights into the complexities of the relationships between schooling and tutoring.

The final paper (Suante & Bray, 2024) in the main body of this Special Issue focuses on research methods in the field. The authors rightly point out that many analyses, especially quantitative ones that simply treat private tutoring on a yes/no basis, are simplistic. Further, even predetermined categories of private tutoring set out in questionnaires may not accurately reflect realities. The paper shows ways in which the understandings of the authors evolved in the processes of their research. It also highlights the value of combined insider and outsider perspectives.

The cultural context of the paper is Myanmar, in which shadow education has a long history as evidenced for example by the promulgation by the military authorities in that era of a law to restrict the phenomenon (Burma, 1984). That law mainly had a political rather than educational motive, aiming to reduce the influences that tutors could have on children and youths outside the strictly-monitored school system. Yet while the scale of shadow education may have diminished at that time, it subsequently expanded to the point at which in Yangon (the largest city and former capital), for example, over 80% of students in Grades 9 and 11 surveyed in 2017 were receiving it (Bray et al., 2020, pp. 40–41). In such circumstances, shadow education is taken as a normal part of family lives, but families have to take multiple far-reaching decisions on the types of tutoring that they acquire. Availability of different forms is of course the starting point for the families, but beyond that they must consider what they can afford, what peers are doing, and what will actually help the students to reach their goals.

Voice and policy review

Alongside academic papers, the ECNU Review of Education publishes Voices from practitioners in the field and Policy Reviews. The Special Issue on shadow education in the Nordic countries had a Voice article from the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the largest tutorial company in Denmark (Kany, 2021), and a pair of policy reviews. One policy review focused on the Norwegian policy initiative of offering free homework assistance in schools (Hu & Huang, 2021), and the other focused on shadow education policy in ROK during the pandemic (Piao & Hwang, 2021). Matching these works, the present Special Issue has a Voice article from the CEO of the Australian Tutoring Association (ATA) and a policy review of out-of-school education in Belarus.

In the Voice article, Dhall (2024) recounts his personal history from the 1990s when he was a secondary-school teacher and first became aware of issues relating to private tutoring. He learned that one of his students had been receiving tutoring at considerable cost to her family, and that the tutoring did not achieve the goals that its providers had promised. He began investigations into the tutoring industry and found dimensions that he considered ethically problematic. Later he found that some of his own students were receiving tutoring in forms that raised ethical issues. His article documents his journey in addressing such practices, particularly through the ATA but also in other ways. Dhall runs his own tutoring company alongside his work as CEO of the ATA. He expresses strong commitment to ethics and to oversight of the industry, feeling that self-regulation will not be adequate by itself. Beyond Australia, Dhall has many international connections and can indeed claim international influence in codes of ethics for providers of tutoring.

The final paper (Liu & Zubko, 2024) has particular value to the English-language literature because Belarus rarely appears in that literature yet has much of interest. Focusing on state-funded out-of-school education, it has a rather different starting point than the papers about private operations. Liu and Zubko commence with historical observations, noting the importance of out-of-school education in the pre-Soviet decades of the 20th century, the Soviet era from 1917 to 1991, and the post-Soviet era from 1991 onwards in independent Belarus. The paper is mainly concerned with the last of these eras, but the predecessors are worth noting.

Focusing on contemporary patterns, Liu and Zubko highlight the wording of the 2011 Code of the Republic of Belarus about Education and a set of subsequent regulations. They remark that “the current out-of-school education system in Belarus blends the core character of Soviet and EU countries' out-of-school education to embody the advantages of these two different systems,” and proceed to documentation of both comprehensive and specialized approaches. Among the specialized institutions are the ones focusing on regional study tours, ecosystem protection, physical training, science and technology, and art. In many settings, and perhaps in Belarus itself, such programs can also be delivered by the private sector. For the present collection of papers on shadow education, the summary for the public sector provided by Liu and Zubko provides a useful counterpoint.

Conclusion

We are glad to present these papers as a further contribution to the expanding literature on shadow education and its counterparts. Now in its third decade of substantive development, comparative literature on this theme has begun to blossom (Zhang & Bray, 2020). We are proud at the ECNU Review of Education to present here the third Special Issue on the theme, and the journal will welcome further submissions for future publication in special or general issues. As mentioned at the outset, the 2021 conference organized by CIRIST at ECNU had strong impact within China, and we are pleased to have been a channel for exchange of insights between stakeholders in China and their international counterparts.

The range of contexts in the present collection is striking. The articles include focus on high-income countries in the GCC group together with ROK and Australia. They also focus on low-income contexts in Myanmar and India. Yet perhaps even more important than economic factors are cultural ones. Thus, the GCC countries, ROK, and Australia may share the characteristic of having high per capita incomes, but greatly differ in their social cultures. These cultures shape attitudes to education and to the marketplace as much as to other domains.

Also important among contextual variables are political transitions of various kinds. The political shift experienced in Belarus with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union is especially striking, but even in the other countries policies for both public schooling and private tutoring have tended to shift with changing leadership in national and subnational governments. Bhorkar has elsewhere made this point with reference to Maharashtra State in India (Bhorkar, 2021), and it has been similarly evident in ROK (Lee et al., 2010), Myanmar (Suante, 2022), and most other countries around the globe. Thus, although overall shifts that permit increased roles for the private sector have been striking across world regions (see, e.g., UNESCO, 2021; Verger et al., 2016), variations are evident in individual countries and across time.

The above observation provides a link to patterns in China, which were the core focus of the 2021 CIRIST conference. Prior to 2021, the trajectory of shadow education in China had to some extent resembled those elsewhere, with much tutoring in the early stages being provided by serving teachers but with the government first discouraging and then prohibiting that provision (Zhang & Bray, 2021). The government discouragement and prohibition of teachers providing tutoring opened more avenues for tutorial companies, which began to boom especially in urban areas. Technological advances fuelled the boom, reducing travel time for clients and enabling providers to reach rural as well as urban areas; closure of schools during the pandemic further expanded the demand for supplementary services. However, the July 2021 national-government policy sharply reduced the size of the tutorial sector. In October 2022, for example, the Ministry of Education reported that the number of offline tutoring institutions had been reduced by 96% from 124,000 to 4,932, and that online institutions had been reduced by 87% from 263 to 34 (Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, 2022). The main official objective was double reduction of the academic burden on school children from homework and from tutoring, though other concerns were about dilution of the roles of schooling and capitalization of the education sector (Zhang, 2023). The long-term effects of this policy remain to be seen, and deserve continuing investigation and analysis with international comparisons.