Tutoring has been touted as the answer for students who are falling behind academically for years. In theory, it’s wonderful: tutoring involves meeting up with an expert in a field to go over what students are struggling with. But in reality, you start to see the many pitfalls in its execution. Often, it introduces issues such as the difficulty to find great tutors or the negative impact on a student’s actual learning. But the far more serious problem is that no one appears to realize these gaps even exist, acknowledge them, or try to fix them. Amidst all of this, tutoring continues to be peddled by teachers and tutors to keep their doors open. There is a reason why tutoring sounds like such a lovely concept in theory but perhaps not in reality—and to find out why, we must look at our tutors and their methodology, as well as the tutees and their habits and critical thinking skills.
Any tutor can teach a student, but an actually effective tutor is extremely difficult to find. Most tutors are unable to pinpoint the manner in which a student best learns, spending hours on ineffective methods of learning or going over material that the student has already learned. Most tutors are either strongly structured or strongly unstructured. The structured tutor will assertively work from notes without realizing the student is not learning anything new. The make-do tutor, on the other hand, teaches strictly by way of the student’s homework—a week’s worth of absence from homework makes the lesson useless. In all of these scenarios, the lesson turns out to be a waste of money and time, and the student leaves without gaining any guidance on how to improve his knowledge.
Even if a student manages to find a good tutor, there can still be issues with the individual situation of the student that impacts the tutoring’s efficacy. There can be no deficiency of knowledge of the subject but something deeper—lack of interest, distraction, or personal complications. Such things cannot be corrected by a tutor. Instead of treating these causes in reality, incompetent tutors “cover” the subject again and again and try to fix the symptom rather than the root of the issue. Tutoring, in most cases, is a provisional measure for a problem that needs to be solved by way of extra effort and another solution.
Most students acquire tutoring when they are young through products like Kumon, which may have adverse effects as the student grows older. With the constant assistance being provided to the students as they grow up, they begin to anticipate it. They may never get to learn to deal with problems on their own, but rather expect someone to teach them how to overcome them. This dependency is a real issue in the long term—especially during exams or when they are not assisted. Tutoring in this way inadvertently discourages the learning of problem-solving and critical thinking skills. These are skills that extend beyond the classroom—they’re essential to decision-making and autonomy in everyday life. Ironically, the constant help that is meant to make the students smarter can actually make them less capable of thinking for themselves. Furthermore, research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology notes that excessive external academic support can cause students to lose intrinsic motivation, leading to disinterest or even aversion toward the subject being studied.
Tutoring in broad terms seems like an excellent suggestion, but there are concealed issues that render it useless, or even detrimental to learning, in the bigger picture. With untrained tutors, incompatibility between learning approaches, student dependence, and bypassing of core issues, tutoring can cause more harm than good. If tutors took the extra effort to teach students how to be independent, then tutoring could, at last, be of some use rather than just being gratifying to tutors monetarily.
