Coaching Classes: The Best Way Forward For Education?

By Author: rohit taparia
Total Articles: 5
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You’d have to be blind or seriously blinkered to have not seen them – the advertisements for coaching classes adorning the BEST public buses here in Mumbai. The juxtaposition of bright colors and physics; the beaming faces of professors promising to deliver the very best results for your promising students; the awkwardly-shaped passport sized photographs of past toppers enlarged and touched-up for public display, staring up at you, seemingly not very proud of their glorious achievements with an almost unreal air about themselves making you wonder: are these real people or merely mannequins for the dress that is a respectable education? “IIT-Jee Coaching Classes, We Guarantee You The Very Best Scores For A Bright Future” – gleams the ultraviolet text as a double-Decker huffs and puffs down the road. “Years of Experience, Guaranteed Results, Toppers in ICSE, SSC, HSC, All Streams (Arts, Science, Commerce) Come One Come All – invites the not-so-inviting looking advert on another bus.
Is this what education has been reduced to? A rat-race involving those who can procure the most promising students and subsequently ...
... train (or torture) them towards a perfect score in that one big life-changing examination? It just doesn’t sit right with me. Something has got to give: could the way forward be those fashionable Education Portals online where you can download replicas of tomorrow’s entrance examination and memorize the answers so as to ensure your “very bright future” without taking a toll on your parent’s hard-earned money? Pioneers in this burgeoning field certainly are quite disdainful of the coaching class craze. We interviewed a businessman from Mumbai who plans to start his own education portal, and he said, “I am not against the concept of coaching classes wherein students gather together to gain knowledge under the careful supervision of qualified and experienced professors. However, in today’s context things are not what they seem: classrooms are overly crowded with no care for the student’s comfort or any student-teacher interaction whatsoever; the lectures and textual and monotonous with no scope for proper learning; at the end of each session, a comprehensive handout is distributed which students are required to go home and memories; so what was the use of the whole exercise?” Such opinions are widespread in the current scenario here in Mumbai.

Another alternative to the traditional coaching classes is private tuition. These, however, are far too expensive for the masses and are thus restricted to the well-off sections of society. Tuition classes enjoy the advantages of a favorable student-teacher ratio; individual attention; discipline and moreover a more pleasant learning experience. There is no shortage of teachers available in the current situation. The problem, however, lies with the students. Oftentimes students who can afford the luxury of private tuition classes don’t feel the need to take them seriously leading to slacking on their part, thereby lackluster results in their examinations. So what is the solution? Perhaps a combination of tuition classes and an education portal: a website whereby students can download interesting course material, tips and tricks for acing the examinations as well as previous years’ test papers for practice at home. Such enterprises are few and far between. The need of the hour is for teachers to embrace technology like Facebook and YouTube for their students’ advantage. A website that can advise students as to which tuition class to choose from the vast variety of professors available could also prove to be a breakthrough in the current scenario. For now, though, we are left to cringe at ridiculous BEST bus advertisements as we make a silent prayer for the future of education in India.

MyTopTeacher.com, a free platform for teachers to connect with their current and prospective students, Online Tuition Classes and get feedback on their teaching methods. The site currently has approximately 16,500 teacher profiles of Tuition Classes in personal training, dance, GMAT, Coaching Classes and many more subjects across India.