This is silly. A school in West Bengal suspended 750 students because they were taking private tuition.

It gets sillier – the tuitions were being conducted by the school teachers themselves !

If anyone, the teachers need to be punished. It is obvious they impart better teaching in their private coaching sessions when they’ve been hired to do the same job at the school.

On a generic note, the notion of discouraging coaching classes which institutions often adopt is a classic attitude of crushing competition. They are afraid of competition and thus, a free market. I am of the view that if a student finds the need to attend private coaching classes, the fault lies entirely with the faculty, so the student must be exempted from attending the same classes in school. Further, faculty salaries must be scaled based on attendance. This will keep them on their toes and they’ll have an incentive to perform better.

In the current setting, a college professor has no reason whatsoever to take any effort to improve. Unlike U.S. universities where students’ feedback is a mandatory ritual, Indian colleges seldom seek feedback, and almost never act on it.

These are simple things to implement, and go a long way in bettering the system.

The colleges themselves stand to gain from this, but who’s listening ?