Think about why people pay tens of thousands of dollars for a mid-career master's degree.
Most of the time, nobody does it for the pure joy of knowledge or research. It is defensive paper-chasing because having just a basic bachelor's degree no longer feels safe.
We have taken that exact corporate anxiety and pushed it down to our children. Tuition used to be a temporary fix when a child failed a subject or could not grasp fractions. Now, it has become an unofficial second school day that everyone pays for out of their own pocket.
Sending kids to tuition has become like self-funding a postgrad: exhausting, overpriced, and driven largely by the fear of falling behind.
Saturday mornings at the mall
Walk into any neighbourhood mall on a Saturday morning, and the scene is identical. Children, in school uniform or home clothes alike, are moving between enrichment centres with heavy tuition bags. They sit through two hours of Mother Tongue, followed by another two hours of heuristic problem sums.
The real absurdity is that parents are paying good money to give their own children overtime work. If an employer asked you to stay late every night and then billed you for the desk space, you would resign on the spot. Yet with our own kids, we willingly hand over the credit card every month.
Nobody wants to step back first
Part of this happens because no parent wants to step back alone. The moment someone in the class WhatsApp group mentions that their child is already covering next year's syllabus during the June holidays, everyone panics. We convince ourselves that without the boost from tuition, our child will lag behind when the AL score bands come out.
So the baseline gets pushed higher for everyone. School examination papers get harder to differentiate the top bands, which leads parents to buy thicker stacks of top-school past year papers. It turns into an arms race where the only clear winners are the tuition centres expanding into every mall.
The worker who cannot quit
There is also an uncomfortable truth about agency here. When an adult decides to take an evening degree, that adult makes the choice and carries the load. If the fatigue becomes too much, an adult can withdraw or drop a module.
A child has no say in the matter. They finish seven hours in school, get through CCA, and then have to turn up for another round of drills. We tell ourselves we are giving them a head start, but we are simply stretching their working hours past what most adults could endure.
The returns on all this spending are also rarely what we promise ourselves. Drilling children on model answers teaches them pattern recognition rather than genuine curiosity. They learn how to spot keywords for the marker's rubric, but they lose the appetite to read or explore on their own.
Worse, they arrive at secondary school already tired of studying. When learning becomes nothing more than a series of paid transactions and assessment sheets, curiosity disappears. By the time genuine academic depth is required, their energy is already spent.
Before signing up for next term
Stepping back does not mean ignoring their schoolwork. Helping a child grasp difficult concepts or hiring a tutor for a specific weakness makes sense. The problem begins when we use tuition to soothe our own anxieties rather than address an actual learning gap.
We need to recognise where our money and our children's weekends are going. Before we renew the next term's fees, we ought to ask if our child truly needs this extra class or if we are merely afraid of an empty schedule. Childhood was never meant to be an entry-level resume.