The unparalleled consumer prosperity of the last 150 years, brought about mainly by access to cheap fossil fuel energy, has produced a paradoxical situation.
On the one hand, increasing mass production, automation and computerisation of both consumer goods and services has caused most jobs in the developed countries to become dumbed down. In turn, this has had the consequence of allowing, if not encouraging, a dumbing-down of state education systems in the developed countries of the world.
On the other hand, the success of the scientific method has enabled scientific research to flower as never before. There are now many times more scientists alive and working today than have lived in all previous generations of mankind added together. Perhaps this is just as well, because the decline of cheap oil and gas resources over the next century means that quite new methods of energy production and associated technologies will have to be devised if civilisation as we know it -- with all its panoply of goods and services -- is to be sustained.
This is already having an effect on the education systems of at least two countries of which I have reasonable knowledge -- America and England. In both countries, many middle- and lower-middle class parents who are perceptive enough to see where we are heading and cannot afford the superb, but high-fee, education supplied by the more traditional private schools, are looking alternatives for their children. In England, for example, there are at least three well-funded consortia who are planning to create a fairly large sector of new private schools with fees well below those of the traditional private schools -- indeed, at levels which are similar to the cost of state education.
But meeting the demand for a better quality of education in an increasingly complex world is not just confined to schools. Only a week ago, in posting No 747." The future of education", I wrote about a recent survey which showed that 25% of parents in England pay for extra tuition for their children -- mainly in basic subjects such as English and Mathematics because the state schools are not teaching them well enough.
This week the Economist has taken up and 'globalised' this tutorial theme in a short item shown below. It is clear that this is already a growth industry and due to grow very much larger in the years to come as state secondary schools continue to decline in quality. Unfortunately, this tutorial expansion will only be confined to an additional marginal tranche of parents who can afford the fees, however modest they are. The existing skills and income divide within developed countries will continue to grow unless and until nation-states yield their monopoly of education (strictly speaking, a quasi-monopoly or oligopoly) by issuing education vouchers and allowing parents total free choice.
Even this will not quickly transform the quality of education. Many parents, themselves badly educated and unmotivated in the case of their children, will be slow to take advantage of a wider choice. It will take two or three generations at least until results show through. But the idea that state-funded privately-managed schools should be able to compete with state-managed schools in supplying tomorrow's necessary skills is something which cannot be resisted for much longer by protective interests such as teaching unions and state bureaucracies.
Keith Hudson
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SCHOOL'S OUT
Education outside school is booming, and a new industry with it
It is big, fast-growing, largely invisible, unregulated and fragmented. But now the private-tuition industry is changing. The world's biggest private-education company, Kaplan (part of the Washington Post group) is expanding its operations. Two other providers of franchised branded teaching, Kip McGrath, a publicly-quoted Australian company, and Kumon, a privately held Japanese firm, are growing fast, with more than 700 teaching centres between them. And a British firm, Fleet Tutors, has created the first nationally branded provider of home tutors.
Private tuition has come out of the closet, says Fleet Tutors' owner, Mylène Curtis. Until a year and a half ago it was a covert activity parents whispered to each that they had a tutor. That's changed, she says, chiefly thanks to the realisation that private tuition is so widespread the industry's best-known client is Tony Blair, whose teenage children all had private lessons to supplement their state-school education.
Such parents are the first kind of customer. They are worried that bad exam results will doom their offspring's life chances, and are increasingly distrustful of schools. They used to say: "I pay my taxes, and the system should educate my child", says Alan Biggs of Kip McGrath. Now they are realising that if they want their children to have opportunities, they need to grasp the nettle and pay the money.
It is not a huge amount of money. Kumon, which provides proprietary maths and English teaching to 50,000 pupils at 560 centres in Britain, charges £45 ($82) per subject per month for a twice-weekly lesson and homework. Many of its customers are low-income ambitious parents from ethnic minorities. Fleet Tutors' typical customer pays £340 for 13 one-on-one lessons -- one-tenth the cost of a term's fees at a private school.
The other big customer is the state, which wants remedial teaching for children who have fallen behind. Fleet Tutors, the market leader, works with 30 local education authorities and says the state is now its most important customer. Kumon is opening centres inside schools.
Estimating the size of the market is tricky. There are no official statistics. An opinion poll this week commissioned by the Sutton Trust, a charity, suggests that around 6% of pupils in the 11-16 age group received private tuition in the past year. A study last year indicated that around a quarter of all schoolchildren have private coaching at some point in their school career. Based on these figures, Fleet Tutors believes that the total turnover of the business is more than £200m, with its own market share at 11%. Neither of the other big companies has any estimate at all. I've never sat down and thought about it,says Mr Biggs of Kip McGrath.
But there is no doubt about the growth. Fleet Tutors' turnover rose 35% last year, though it was held back by labour shortages; Ms Curtis is trying to double her staff of 3,500 active tutors. Kip McGrath's 27 franchises in 2002 have risen to nearly 200 now, boosted, it says, by the number of teachers wanting to leave the state system and run their own business getting a franchise going costs just £18,000. Kumon's 10% annual growth is stoked by software that finds areas with the right demographics of family size, wealth and ethnicity.
Potentially far bigger is Kaplan, a huge provider of private education to all age groups in America. In Britain, it is already the second-biggest private provider of professional training, and has another test-preparation company, mainly teaching candidates for American university-entrance exams. Last year it launched teaching for British university-entrance tests in law and medicine. It had to turn away students and has doubled the number of courses offered. Now Kaplan says it is planning further expansion, chiefly in preparing students for university admission.
Unlike private schools, which are increasingly tightly regulated, private tutors can operate freely. Although quality varies, they are best-placed to respond to those seeking flexibility, results and choice in education, and finding them lacking.
The Economist -- 23 June 2005
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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