Σύντομος ορισμός (από τον καιρό που είχα καταθέσει τον όρο σε άλλο φόρουμ):
Shadow education is defined as activities outside of school that mimic (shadow) activities performed in school. For example, activities such as crams school, private tutoring (for profit), and test prep services.
Με περισσότερες λεπτομέρειες, από το άρθρο τού David P. Baker “Institutional Change in Education: Evidence from Cross-National Comparisons” στο
The New Institutionalism in Education (Heinz-Dieter Meyer (Editor), Brian Rowan (Editor)) [τα έντονα, δικά μου].
THE INSTITUTIONAL PARADOX OF THE WORLDWIDE GROWTH OF SHADOW EDUCATION
The Facts
Supplemental private educational activities consumed by families with public-school students (Σnickel: δημόσια εκπαιδευτήρια) with the expressed purpose of helping their children in schools are spreading throughout the world. Large-scale use of structured, supervised outside-school learning in the form of tutoring, review sessions, proprietary cram schools, and related practices to help in the mastery of academic subjects in school are found in substantial numbers in most educational systems worldwide. While activities such as tutoring have been around for centuries, their endurance and growth in light of a century and a half of worldwide expansion of public mass schooling is an interesting phenomenon to consider from a NI perspective. Further, there is evidence to suggest that the use of these private outside-school educational activities has intensified over time and that they are rapidly becoming normative components of education in this era of highly legitimated public mass schooling.
In 1992, while researching how social status was reproduced in the reputed highly meritocratic Japanese selection to university process, the late David Stevenson and I coined the term shadow education to describe these kinds of educational activities (Stevenson and Baker 1992). Shadow education conveys the image of outside-school learning activities paralleling features of formal schooling used by students to increase their own educational opportunities (see also Bray 1999; George 1992; LeTendre 1994; Tsukada 1991). These activities go well beyond routinely assigned homework; instead they are organized, structured learning opportunities that take on schoollike processes. And most important they shadow the requirements of the public school that the child attends. The after-hours cram schools found in some Asian countries, such as juku in Japan and hakwon in Korea, are the most extreme in mimicking in-school forms. But there are a wide variety of activities that share a similar logic, such as correspondence courses, one-on-one private tutoring, examination preparatory courses, and full-scale preparatory examination schools (e.g., Japanese yobiko). For example, systems of tutoring are extensive in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Greece, and Turkey. This phenomenon has become so widespread that in 1999 UNESCO commissioned Mark Bray, a comparativist of educational systems, to chronicle and document these activities worldwide. Using national case information, his report. The Shadow Education System: Private Tutoring and Its Implications for Planners, shows both the growth of these kinds of activities and the spread across nations. (See also the chapter by Davies et al. on private shadow schooling in Toronto in this volume.)
