I learned a new word this week. “Afterschooling” (noun), “afterschool” (verb; as in “I afterschool my kids”) Afterschooling is consciously augmenting your child’s school-provided curriculum. Afterschooling parents are hybrids: think homeschooler meets laissez faire parent. Many of us were afterschooled and didn’t even know it; our parents probably didn’t know it either. They took us to story hour at the local library and spent time helping us winnow down our pile to the ten books our membership card allowed us to check out. They made bets with us at the dinner table that saw us scramble to pull out the oversized folio National Geographic Atlas of the World to prove to them that Timbuktu did exist (and where.) They helped us stack up copper pennies, layering them with lemon juice-dipped cloth and then measuring the current that ran through our primitive pile. It was all very ad hoc. More formal afterschool activities were rather limited and tended to consist of the likes of Brownies and Beavers, ballet, karate/judo, piano or violin lessons. Instead, we played in the street, founded detective agencies, and established publications such as The Neighbourhood News (circulation 30; paid circulation zero) which lasted several years before folding.
Afterschooling today is another matter and attacked with a rigour far removed from the ad hoc nature of our own childhood stimulation. It’s about private tutoring for SATs, the 11-plus (whether for grammar schools or schools in non-grammar districts with selective streams), Common Entrance, GCSEs and A Levels, and elocution and coaching for public school interviews. It’s about regular attendance at Kumon centres and French clubs and half term “camps” and Christmas and Easter revision courses at crammers. What boggles my mind is that so much of this is not so much to provide remedial help to those who need it, but rather to ensure a child is able to remain comfortably in the right spot on the curve to ensure whatever academic success his parents aspire to for him. And there’s a certain amount of keeping up with the Joneses in this too; parents of perfectly able children are signing up en masse to Kumon and/or seeking out established local tutors out of fear of being left behind.
All of this, of course, raises the question: If our state schools are good, why do so many of us feel compelled to shuttle our kids from tutor to Kumon to le Club Tricolore and back (stopping off at WHSmith to buy a few more standardised tests to practice at home)? We know the answer: many of our state schools do not, in fact, meet the standards many of us would hope for them, but we still want our kids to succeed (or, at the very least, get into that public school we’ve been saving up for for all these years in the state primary). Ergo, many of us succumb to the drill we all know. What amazes me, however, is the number of children at fee-paying schools who boomerang from the home of the private tutor, to Kumon, and back to yet another tutor. Either this is an indictment of the education these fee-paying schools provide (and calls into question what, exactly, you are paying for) or it’s an indictment of our society where even the privileged feel obligated to take away the precious time our kids have to become local sleuths, establish newspapers with no paid circulation, and pursue other, equally pointless but somehow important pursuits.
Snowdon on Schools 