Private tutoring across the Mediterranean

Abstract

Although private tutoring has a long history, prior to the present century it attracted

very little professional discussion or academic research. Ministries of Education

preferred and were allowed to ignore the phenomenon, chiefly on the grounds that

tutoring was provided in a marketplace beyond their remit as supervisors of formal

schooling. Faculties of Education in universities showed little interest, since their

primary responsibilities were also with formal school systems. Likewise,

international agencies mainly busied themselves with activities that focused on

schooling. They paid little attention to out-of-school tutoring even though in some

countries it was a major activity. Relegated to the ‘private’ sphere, as its name

indicates, private tutoring has often been perceived by educators and policy makers

as falling outside the purview of ‘public’ education and its equitable provision.

This inattention has begun to be remedied, as witnessed by the growing body of

research on privatisation in education, which unsettles notions of what counts as

‘private’ and what counts as ‘public’ in the provision of schooling opportunities.

This body of research shows not only that private tutoring is not a ‘private’

phenomenon, but that it is intertwined in complex ways with the public provision

of schooling and operates in relation to it in multifaceted ways. Notwithstanding,

huge gaps remain in both basic information and conceptual analysis. This

collection addresses these gaps as they concern the Mediterranean region.

The first wide-ranging international study of private supplementary tutoring was

published in 1999 by UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning

(IIEP) (Bray, 1999). The book attracted considerable attention, but a common

reaction was that it was mostly relevant to societies in East Asia, such as Hong

Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, in which the phenomenon was especially

visible. Although the book presented examples from all other regions of the world,

general recognition of the phenomenon was weaker outside East Asia.