As much as Anisha Lakhani's novel Schooled is about the dark realities of classroom life inside the prestigious Langdon Hall, what Anna Taggert, the novel's main character, engages in outside of the classroom is just as significant and telling as what she does inside of it. Despite her initial remonstrations of and somewhat self-righteous abstinence from excessively over-priced tutoring (and cheating) with her students, Anna, driven by material need and desire, eventually gives in and follows suit. In this, Lakhani presents an interesting and somewhat organic perspective on this often veiled yet highly impacting facet of elite, privileged education.
Although it was public, the high school I attended was probably better equipped than many private schools. I know there is a stigma at Colby about the value of a boarding school education versus a public one, but my school by no means fits that. We had small classes, plasma tvs in every classroom and every ten feet in the hall, au bon pain catering in our cafeteria, and indoor and an outdoor track (which is rare for schools), a tv and radio station, smart boards in every classroom, laptops for every student, state of the art science equipment, etc. What I'm getting at is that even though I didn't go to private school, I related to this world of privilege and elitism in high school that Lakhani portrays. With the luxuries my school had inevitably came students whose families could afford, via taxes rather than private tuition, to purchase all of our excessive amenities, and thus, the majority of the student body was very affluent. Just like Anna's students in the novel, many of my peers had private tutors and often more than one. It infuriated me to watch highly capable students spend absurd amounts of money needlessly on tutors (I had one friend who spent $20,000 a semester on private tutors alone--one for every subject and one or two for college/ test prep) just because they could afford it. While I understand the parental desire to give your children all that you can, it has always struck me that that kind of tutoring really cripples the tutees: the tutors become more than a teacher; they are a crutch whom the students rely on so heavily that they lose faith in their own ability to do a semester's work on their own. What's more, money can't buy innate intelligence, but it can definitely buy grades. While the ability to do work and intellect are not bound by class, the students who could not afford tutoring, despite being just as smart if not smarter than many of those who could, were put at a disadvantage.
The world of private tutoring is a mysterious one, and it was interesting for me to read this book while working as a peer tutor in the writers' center. Having come from a world where what Lakhani describes is all too omnipresent, I both related to Anna's plight and was repulsed by it. In the Farnham Writers' Center, the crux of our ideology is to make student-writers better, not their papers. We're not there to give student's the right words to say or tell them how to phrase something more aesthetically. Instead, our goals are to help the tutees understand the roots of their errors on a general level, and learn how to self-correct their papers with a better understanding of mechanics, organization, and syntax that they can take with them well after they've turned in that specific paper. In essence, the tutoring at Colby defies the student expectation that Lakhani describes that tutors do the work for the students. In making this juxtaposition, it is apparent that tutoring should be a mechanism for improvement via exegetical probing and the acquisition of problem solving skills, not getting each assignment done perfectly with no knowledge on the student's part of what is fundamentally good or bad in her or his work.
I think I need to return to this topic in the future to concretize my opinion on the polar worlds of tutoring I experienced in both working as one, and reading one through the lens of Anna Taggert. Regardless, and regardless of my qualms with Lakhani's writing style, Schooled invariably exposes the desperate and amoral world of hyper-tutoring that many students who live in Taggert's world, and mine, are blindly and often tragically conditioned into.
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