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A REVIEW OF CAMBODIAN PRIVATE TUTORING: PARASITIC AND SYMBIOTIC FUNCTIONS TOWARDS THE MAINSTREAM SYSTEM
Abstract
Offering private tutoring (PT) to their students is legal in Cambodia. However, teachers are banned from engaging in PT during official hours and holidays. Literature has proven common root causes across contexts such as low salaries, class size, insufficient instructional times and high-stakes examinations. With a new attempt, this narrative paper aims to discuss PT and its effects from the different stakeholders' perspectives and to reflect PT functions towards mainstream education. On the one hand, symbiosis generates a 'dependency system,' divided into two relationships such as 'commensalism' between PT and the mainstream system, and 'mutualism' between supply and demand-side including the mainstream system. On the other hand, parasitism (professional misconduct) exists owing to policy implementers' laissez-faire approach in exercising the approved codes of conduct. Hence, the parasitism remains in the public classrooms owing to the lack of accountability and monitoring system of the in-charge stakeholders. Its presence enlarges the capacity of the dependency system to cast a shadow over the incomplete shape and size of the mainstream system. Thus, it should be alerted that when it is oversized, this symbiotic function may downplay the mainstream system and moves it away from the core attention of the demand side.
... There is plenty of research on shadow education or private tutoring, as this phenomenon occurs all over the world. While there are many articles on shadow education in Cambodia, most seem to revolve around the themes of corruption and unethical practices in shadow education (see Bray et al., 2019;Brehm & Silova, 2014;Soeung, 2021a). It appears that little has been emphasized on other aspects, such as the benefits and negative impacts of shadow education on students beyond the financial aspect. ...
... One of the most common themes in research related to shadow education is unethical behavior and corruption (see Bray et al., 2019;Brehm & Silova, 2014;Soeung, 2021a). These issues not only pose problems in themselves, but they can also undermine the potential benefits of shadow education, rendering most of the benefits practically useless despite the hefty financial costs involved. ...
Shadow education, also known as private tutoring, is a widespread phenomenon across the world, particularly in East Asia. In Cambodia, it is commonly referred to as “extra classes” in English and “rean kour” in Khmer. While there are many articles on shadow education in Cambodia, most seem to revolve around the theme of corruption resulting from this form of education. Therefore, this chapter aims to provide a well-rounded view of issues concerning shadow education. It starts with a brief introduction to the current situation of shadow education in Cambodia and then explains what shadow education is before moving on to discuss some of the main causes of this occurrence. Next, potential benefits and problems resulting from shadow education are discussed. The chapter also offers some suggestions for relevant stakeholders such as students, parents, teachers, school leaders, the government, and policymakers to address this critical issue.
... Research on shadow education, a global phenomenon, has been extensive. While many studies have focused on issues such as corruption and unethical practices within Cambodia's shadow education system (Bray et al., 2019;Brehm & Silova, 2014;Soeung, 2021a), less attention has been given to other aspects, such as the benefits and negative impacts of shadow education on students beyond financial considerations. Recognizing that shadow education has both positive and negative outcomes, a balanced understanding can help maximize its benefits and minimize its drawbacks. ...
In Cambodia, as in many ASEAN countries, private supplementary tutoring, also known as 'shadow education,' is a significant component of the educational landscape. This chapter examines the root causes of shadow education in Cambodia, the challenges it poses, and the effectiveness of existing policies aimed at regulating this sector. Through semi-structured interviews with 21 principals and teachers, the study identifies key drivers of shadow education, including inadequate formal education, insufficient resources, regulatory gaps, and teachers' low salaries. The findings indicate a widespread reliance on private tutoring to compensate for these deficiencies, which exacerbates educational inequalities. The chapter concludes with targeted recommendations for students, parents, educators, and policymakers, underscoring the critical need for robust and effective regulatory frameworks to address the challenges of shadow education and to enhance the quality and equity of Cambodia's educational system.
... This chapter looks at the many sides of shadow education in Cambodia. It looks at what makes people want it, the problems it causes, and how the government is trying to control and combine these services (Soeung, 2021b). One big reason why shadow education is so popular in Cambodia is that there is a lot of competition for college spots. ...
This chapter examines the COVID-19 pandemic's aftereffects as well as the prevalence and implications of shadow education in Cambodia. Shadow education exacerbates inequality while assisting students in overcoming obstacles in the classroom. Based on an examination of several articles, particularly those published recently, the chapter highlights the adaptability of tutoring by revealing that demand for it increased during the COVID-19 epidemic. Nonetheless, when students from low-income families had to deal with resource and technology limitations, the gaps grew. Policymakers then had to supervise shadow education services and increase access to technology in order to bridge these disparities. Despite these barriers, creativity emerged, proving that informal and official education could coexist. The chapter also covers how rising educational costs for wealthy students during the epidemic changed the nature of shadow education. Finally, the Education Ministry should identify the gaps that exacerbate them and seek to address them to advance enclosure in the educational system.
... Research on shadow education, a global phenomenon, has been extensive. While many studies focus on issues such as corruption and unethical practices within Cambodia's shadow education system (Bray et al., 2019;Brehm & Silova, 2014;Soeung, 2021a), less attention has been paid to other aspects, such as the bene ts and negative impacts of shadow education on students beyond nancial considerations. Recognizing that shadow education has both positive and negative outcomes, a balanced understanding can help maximize its bene ts and minimize its drawbacks. ...
In Cambodia, as in many ASEAN countries, private supplementary tutoring, also known as 'shadow education,' is a significant component of the educational landscape. This chapter examines the root causes of shadow education in Cambodia, the challenges it poses, and the effectiveness of existing policies aimed at regulating this sector. Through semi-structured interviews with 21 principals and teachers, the study identifies key drivers of shadow education, including inadequate formal education, insufficient resources, regulatory gaps, and teachers’ low salaries. The findings indicate a widespread reliance on private tutoring to compensate for these deficiencies, which exacerbates educational inequalities. The chapter concludes with targeted recommendations for students, parents, educators, and policymakers, underscoring the critical need for robust and effective regulatory frameworks to address the challenges of shadow education and to enhance the quality and equity of Cambodia's educational system
... This was because schoolteachers were given full authority to decide whom to move to the next grade and who should repeat a grade. This fact could describe not only in primary school but also beyond (Soeung, 2021b). This generates a "supply creates demand" cycle in some settings (e.g., ...
... Through this study, we have responded to the call to expand and extend Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital (Lareau and Weininger, 2003) to the sphere of shadow education, which has long been lambasted as a competing force to mainstream education and a destabilising and disruptive agent, a veritable parasite preying on parents' and their children's insecurities (Soeung, 2020) and even a form of oppression (Yung, 2020) whose growth in the educational eco-system needs to be controlled and curtailed. However, what needs to be recognised is that it could also be born out of a particular socio-economic eco-system and nurtured by socio-cultural values that have far deeper roots. ...
Shadow education, or supplementary private tutoring, has expanded to become a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide, capitalising on the desires of parents and their children to succeed and excel in education. In doing so, shadow education draws upon and reproduces cultural capital represented by knowledge, skills and educational credentials and symbolic capital constituted in the prestige, privilege and legitimacy of educational achievement. The study on which this article is based adopts a critical discourse analytic approach to examine the websites of five leading private tuition centres in Singapore as seen through the lens of Bourdieu’s concept of capital. The aim is to identify specific forms of cultural capital, examine how they are harnessed for promotional purposes, and show how this reflects and reproduces the forms and representations of educational achievement and success valued in Singapore. Findings offer a deeper understanding of the marketing discourse of shadow education that pivots on the quality of private tutors, success beyond examinations and school, and concrete representations of social distinction and achievement. More significantly, the study contributes to research situated at the nexus of shadow education and Bourdieu’s concept of capital to shed light on how shadow education reflects and magnifies broader socio-cultural orientations and socio-economic structures.
Across the globe, recent decades have brought huge growth of private supplementary education delivered alongside regular schooling. Some types of supplementary education are widely called shadow education because their curricula mimic those of mainstream classes. In Cambodia, supplementary parallel classes are commonly taught by the same teachers as in regular schooling, to some of the same students, and in their own schools. When recruiting students for the private lessons, the teachers use the authority conferred on them as teachers. This can damage trust in the school system, but most families lack power to challenge the arrangements. While Cambodia may be an extreme case, the chapter suggests that basic patterns have relevance to many countries.
This paper defines shadow education as private supplementary tutoring that is fee-based and parallel to mainstream schooling. The study focuses specific attention on the underlying determinants of this private tutoring. This research covers the costs, patterns, intensity, and scale of private tutoring. It also provides detailed insight into the negative and positive implications of coaching, and on the impact that private education has on the educational and social lives of learners in Bangladesh. The paper also analyses the different private tutoring patterns in English, as well as the amount of tutoring offered and not offered in Bangladesh. These key points lead to determining whether the shadow education system in Bangladesh is a curse or a blessing. According to the research conducted in 5 regions in Bangladesh using qualitative method and research design questionnaire 70% support private supplementary education, 30% do not support its development and 100% of participants stated that the emergence of private tutoring was brought about by the low salary of teachers and desires of parents for the academic success of their children.
This study examines Cambodian students’ exam cheating practices throughout their schooling. Based on a thorough analysis of interviews with 19 university students, the study found that, although cheating was more prevalent at the secondary level, individual students’ cheating experiences varied in frequency and timing (i.e. when they started, stopped, increased, or decreased such practices). Curricula, parents’ attitudes, peer behaviour, institutional policies, and – most significantly – relationships with teachers were identified as influencing factors for students’ cheating practices. These findings largely echo academic dishonesty literature, but they also indicate the context-specific features of these factors.
This paper investigates the practice of private supplementary tutoring (also known as ‘shadow education’) by public school teachers in Cambodia, a country with an education system plagued by corruption (Dawson, 2011). The paper begins by introducing the growing phenomenon of private tutoring (PT) in the broader context of Asia. It then turns to an overview of the problems of corruption in Cambodian public services more generally before focusing on corrupt practices specific to the education sector. Within this context the problem of public school teachers providing PT to their own students is introduced, followed by a discussion of the effects of this practice on teachers, students, educational content, and processes of teaching and learning. The paper then shifts to explore potential economic, socio-cultural and organizational factors that may cause teachers to engage in these corrupt practices. Finally, the paper discusses possible solutions, looking at regulatory policies for PT in other Asian countries and attempts at addressing the problem of corrupt PT in Cambodia itself. The paper argues that a combination of advocacy and awareness raising of corruption at the system level, regulation of PT, and reforms to the education sector to increase quality and equity are potential solutions to this challenging problem.
The concept of hidden curriculum has become well established. It addresses the contexts of learning, the actions of students’ peers and teachers, and other domains which shape learning but are not part of official syllabuses. The concept of a hidden marketplace for private tutoring, widely known as shadow education, is less established but also becoming part of general understanding of the complementarities of regular and supplementary instruction. This paper brings the two literatures together to examine the values transmitted, mostly unintentionally, by shadow education in Cambodia. Most of this shadow education is delivered by regular teachers, commonly to their existing students and in their existing schools. The paper considers the impact of shadow education not only on the students who do receive it but also on those who do not. Patterns in Cambodia differ from those in more prosperous countries, but have parallels with other low-income countries. The authors suggest that much more attention is needed to the dynamics and impact of shadow education, including relationships between actors and the values that shadow education transmits as part of the hidden curriculum.
Although private supplementary tutoring has expanded worldwide and become a major industry and a daily activity for students, tutors and families, the research literature has been slow to catch up. The topic is in some respects difficult to research because contours are indistinct and the actors may hesitate to share their experiences and perspectives.
Presenting methodological lessons from diverse cultures, this book contains chapters from both high-income and low-income settings in Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and the Middle East. Separately and together, the chapters present valuable insights into the design and conduct of research. Readers will gain insights for design of instruments, collection of data, and interpretation of findings.
Along with the dramatic expansion of private tutoring around the world, a significant body of literature has been produced to understand this phenomenon. While many studies consider the issue of geographic location, the spatial dimension tends not to be a central focus of private tutoring studies. In contrast, the present essay applies mobility theory to research from Cambodia, where private tutoring is essential to student success. It does so in order to place private tutoring provision into a broader perspective that includes but moves beyond the economic dimensions of supply and demand and the sociological dimensions of economic, cultural , and social capital to include consideration of how private tutoring provision is constrained by a multi-dimensional spatial field of possibilities and how private tutoring participation is enabled by one's position and abilities in relation to that field. The paper argues for increased attention to 'spatial capital' in studies of private tutoring and education generally.
In Malaysia, private tutoring is widely perceived as a household necessity. A 2004/05 household expenditure survey recorded that 20.1 per cent of households with at least one child aged seven to 19 indicated expenditures on private tutoring.