Rethinking Extra Lessons: Are Schools Shifting Responsibility or Enhancing Education

Honestly, schools should stop organizing extra lessons (after school classes) for their students.

This is why.

For God’s sake your role as a school is to solve the child’s academic problem. Why will you push that to the after school classes and even make parents to pay for it after paying the normal school fees.

Look, I am aware that after school classes (evening lesson) address different challenges but they hardly solve the problem of poor academic performance in the way and manner we do it.

I think we need to live up to our responsibilities as schools.

If a child is performing poorly, as a good school, it is your primary responsibilities to solve that problem not to wait for a magical lesson teacher to solve it.

It is therefore sickening to see that the same school that is supposed to solve the problem is the one organising the lesson and charging an extra fee for it.

Yes, I know some students perform below average and their problem may not be solved easily in the morning classroom.

However, a smart school would have envisage this and create a plan on how to solve it. Extra lessons in the evening doesn’t usually solve these problems, it only hides them. This is because there are so many factors that would be responsible for that child’s poor academic performance.

Like I tell people, a child, who lives under a toxic marriage will hardly perform well in the class.

A child who is usually emotionally abused by a gaurdian or any adult around will hardly perform well in the classroom.

A child with chronic learning difficulties such as dyslexia or ADHD will hardly perform better no matter the extra lesson.

All these examples and more shows that schools need to probe further if they truly want to help the children and not just extort money from parents.

Sometimes, just calling the mother and having some soul-soul discussion with her about how she’s raising her son can perform the magic instead of all these extra lessons.

I also understand that some parents keep their children for extra lesson because of the parent’s tight schedule. For instance, the parent can only pick up the children at 6 pm and your school closes at 3 pm. So, such parent will ask for extra lesson on this ground. Not because of the child’s academic performance but because of the parent’s convenience.

If this is the case, then schools must know that adding an extra burden of academic activities will only make the child stressed and at the end of the day nothing will be achieved.

So, what should you do instead

1. Have a well designed program that diagnose students who are applying to your school to ascertain if your school can handle them

2. Design a system within the school program that addresses these challenges. Most are not neccesarily solved by teaching them more content. Sometimes, creating an environment where the students can study on their own can perform the magic and some other times, engaging extra curricular activities might be what they need.

3. Design an after school activities such as sports, games, supervised play, writing etc to engage students whose parent are too busy to pick them up at closing time.

Studies have shown that students who participate in extracurricular activities have greater academic success, greater character development especially in the areas of time-management and leadership skills, more positive social development, and greater interest in community involvement.

Therefore, school owners must ensure that they’re more creative when it comes to extra lessons.

In conclusion, as a school, you have to know that you have a responsibility regarding a child’s academic performance. If you do a proper diagnosis and develop a solution plan that requires some extra expenses, charging for such will not be a bad idea. Also, for parents that are too busy, charging them for after school activities is also not a bad idea.