Journal of Education & Social Policy

Private Lessons between Social Inclusion and Active Citizenship
Sandra Chistolini

Abstract
Across the panorama of education throughout the world, the phenomenon of private lessons is joined to an increase in mass schooling and educating towards distinctive qualities so as to gain a place on an increasingly competitive labour market. Countries are examined in which private lessons are quite widespread and appeal to the expectations of success by children born into middle and upper-middle class families.In Cyprus and in Greece, excessive private lessons encroach on the monthly family income. It is taken for granted that the work done in school is insufficient to learn enough. The school seems not to be able to assure the level of excellence and the success of the entrance examination.The private lessons are functioning as process of inclusion in the society of knowledge insofar as they are providing the necessary competences to deal with the academic achievement. Moreover, the private lessons have the result of providing children with intellectual and instrumental tools useful to exercise the active citizenship. We discuss the contradiction between the concept of democracy which should give consistency to the public school system and the concept of private tuition which means failure to pursue the target of equal opportunity for all in the state educational system.A kind of double schooling with an education, parallel to official standard, is emerging also in Italy where families are slowly moving towards the Cypriot and Greek model of private lessons at home.Problematic discussion consider the critical situation of school as context in which on principle all students can find good conditions of learning and in practice many students are unsatisfied with the teaching methods.

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