Informal magazine July 2018 09 Informal Magazine JULY 18 | Page 6

An
s
y:
g e l a W illi a
A
m
THE CURSE O
THE ACADEMIE
n unfortunate trend in education has
long had parents of school-going
children in its grip! Academies are the
sine qua non for many: that which
they feel they cannot do without.
Instead of working regularly, steadily and
diligently at school, students are under the
impression that ‘Going to the Academy’ is the key
to success. And for reasons best known to them,
parents have no qualms about sending their
children out in the evening and forking out fees
yet again for the education which their children
are already supposed to be receiving at their
day-time school.
I have always found this to be a very odd situation
and one which smacks of corruption. It is surely
obvious that an academy tutor who also teaches
in a daytime institution has a vested interest in
not teaching effectively during school hours in
order to motivate his pupils to attend his classes
in the evening where the real teaching will take
place; this malpractice provides a nice little
double earner for the teacher.
Academies can also lead to absenteeism in
schools; some parents allow their children to
sleep late and to take days off school because
they can catch up at the academy on concepts
missed at school. This teaches children that
regularity and constant application and effort are
not particularly important - an unsound principle
for a young person, I would have thought, as is
also the parents’ willingness to pay twice for the
same thing; this surely teaches a young person to
have a casual disregard for his/her parents’
hard-earned money: “Let them pay twice!”
A good school aims for academic excellence and
also to inculcate moral values and good habits in
its pupils: diligence, honesty, kindness, respect,
tolerance and integrity, whilst academies aim at A
grades (and are sometimes not too concerned
about how they get them.)It seems to be accepted
that leaked examination papers are an excellent
way of attaining an A grade and, failing that,
tutors nowadays provide ‘guess papers ‘for their
students so that the pampered darlings do not
have to actually revise their course but work only
to the questions ‘guessed at’. Study Skills courses
train students to revise double the number of
topics as there are questions in the paper, plus
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two more. So for a four question paper, one is
advised to revise thoroughly ten topics. But with
a tutor and his ‘guess paper’, if not the leaked
paper itself, only a loser need bother with that
much work!
In other ways, too, academies may provide an
easy alternative to using one’s brain: students can
benefit a great deal from thinking about what has
been taught in class that day, reading and
revising, it, writing up their notes in a neat and
accessible way and writing essays or solving
problems to consolidate their learning. There is
no time to do this, however, if they come home
from school and, after lunch and a brief rest, are
off to the academy.
Since the popularity of academies has always
puzzled me, I have tried to work out why parents
submit to them and following are some tentative
conclusions: it appears that schools generally fail
to accept criticism of their teachers and are
affronted by such criticism; parents feel that, if
they complain, their child will be targeted by
members of staff; parents therefore have no
choice, if the teacher at school is incompetent,
but to seek help elsewhere and keep quiet about
their concerns. A shocking state of affairs!
Schools should welcome feedback from parents
and should have no need to be defensive, let
alone antagonistic, if they are providing the
teaching for which the parents are paying. And if
not, then changes must be made!
Secondly, since young people here have far fewer
opportunities for social interaction outside the
bounds of family than do young people in the
West, academies provide a morally acceptable
reason for young people to go out at night and
spend time with others of their own age. Young
people need to do this, and want to do it,
(particularly when they see it in movies all the
time) but how are parents to explain this to the
phupoos and tayas?
“Oh, he’s at the academy! SUCH a serious student!
Such a hardworking boy!”
Now all of the above is not to suggest that there
are no serious teachers or students at academies;
I know that there are; but sometimes, I just wish
they’d take their seriousness and put it to good
use in schools!