“We follow the private tutors not the teachers”: An ethnographic insight into educational practices among the students of an Indian city

Private tuition (PT), a way to supplement teaching provided by professionals, is a growing issue of discussion through countries. The present ethnography on the school students of an Indian city aims to explore and interpret the causes and consequences of popularization of PT that how it gradually is pervading in formal educational curriculum and seriously disrupting the emotion of higher secondary students to their school. It executes an insight into the meanings and practices of the students about PT and school learning and explored certain practices like, students’ and their parents’ rush for securing higher rank in school examination, strong motivation to accumulate human capital for securing advantageous position in higher education and profession in the future, school teachers’ inefficiency or (un)intentional indifference to the process of teaching at school, private tutors’ expectations for earning more perceiving tuition as a business strategy, contemporary system of evaluation and student-teacher ratio as the loci to deal with the issue. The significance of the study lies into grasping the ideas and rationales of the contemporary youth and their culture and contributing to the policies of contemporary education system.