Is parental shame getting in the way of childhood education?
By Charlotte Vangsgaard & Ujjwal Gupta
“Tutor me? No, I’m not a tutee. I’m the one who does the tutoring.” This was Ben, a straight-A student’s retort to his art teacher’s suggestion of finding him a tutor on Netflix’s popular TV show, Never Have I Ever. Such a reaction is not unique to fictional characters – it is emblematic of the shame and stigma widely associated with tutoring across America and is standing in the way of improving learning outcomes for children.
In a recent ethnographic study we conducted alongside Cuemath, a rapidly scaling global math tutoring company, we observed that the most common trigger for parents to solicit tutors was when their children’s grades dropped. Irrespective of the academic performance levels, parents were concerned with any dip in grades relative to their child’s past performance. This comes at a time when declining grades are an increasingly common reality in America, confirmed by the steepest ever drop in math grades reported on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2022.
However, the journey to finding a tutor is not so straightforward. Parents often associate tutoring with shame – it is a sensitive subject among American families. For instance, Beth, a mother of three from Queens, spoke in a hushed tone of voice when describing the time her daughter needed a math tutor in the 7th Grade, afraid she would hear her talk about the unutterable word tutoring, from the other room.
If re-envisioned by parents, tutoring can be a powerful learning resource to discover and cultivate children’s life-long talent.
The origins of this shame, however, are not only the hearts, minds and friends of these children. Parents experience this shame too. Often, American parents’ identities are inextricably linked to the success and failure of their child; they fear tutoring could be interpreted as a sign of poor performance for the child, but also a sign of parental failure. “I have to review all the homework that leaves our house. My children’s grades and efforts reflect on me as a parent, and it reflects poorly on me if their work isn’t to my own standard,” said Tamera, a work-from-home ‘tiger-mom’ from Houston.
In the face of children’s declining scores, some parents recounted feeling ashamed that their parenting approach to learning wasn’t successful. “Sometimes I worry I was too hands-off”, sighed Andy, a stay-at-home dad from LA, “I had a feeling he was struggling”. Others were embarrassed that parents in their networks would think they are doing a bad job at raising children. While some parents look for tutors discreetly on FB and neighbourhood groups to conceal the situation and protect their reputation, others experience an alarming ‘wake-up’ moment and start looking eagerly for a tutor online or through their friends’ network.
In contrast, many immigrant parents have a different reaction. We observed that Eastern European, African, Indian and other Asian parents, often believe that the American education system is not rigorous enough and blame it for their child’s poor performance. Reminiscent of their own schooling experience in their countries of birth, immigrant parents desire schools to offer tougher or more frequent testing, and cultivate more discipline for children to actively listen to and respect their teachers. As immigrant parents tend to blame the US education system for their children’s academic competence, rather than themselves, they feel less shame admitting the child needs tutoring. This allows them to more freely and openly speak to and consult other parents to find tutors.
Irrespective of immigration status, upper-middle-class parents in and around big American cities often feel embarrassed finding their child a tutor. This discomfort pushes parents to find band-aid tutors that can quickly fix the problem or at best improve grades in the short term. Such an instrumentalisation of learning can stifle parents’ ability to find their child a ‘tutor for life’, one that not only enhances short-term performance but also long-term conceptual understanding and love for the subject.
Take the case of June Huh, for instance, a mathematician and Princeton professor awarded the 2022 Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. Once a high school dropout and aspiring poet, June’s calling for math was only later ignited by the famed Japanese mathematician, Heisuke Hironaka’s immersive and exploratory teaching style. June is now indubitably regarded as a genius, acclaimed for finding linkages between the seemingly disparate fields of combinatorics and geometry.
If re-envisioned by parents, tutoring can be a powerful learning resource to discover and cultivate children’s life-long talent. Especially in a digital age, access to teachers and resources across the world is better than ever before in the history of humanity; parents should feel confident in finding the right tutor for their children to bring out the unique abilities of every child.