A few days ago, I was rung up by a woman who wanted me to coach her daughter for the entrance test to my university department. Insensible to my outrage at being asked to prepare a candidate for an examination which I would conduct, she thought her approach entirely natural. When I told her that I was on principle strongly opposed to private tuition, the statement made no impression on her. Her assumptions about the teaching community and the tuition system might indeed justify the debate generated by a controversial aside to the proposed state budget. It is another question why the state finance minister should tell us, in a footnote to a budget as bankrupt of ideas as of cash, that the government intends a bill banning private tuition by teachers in state or state-aided schools and colleges. The ban is not part of his budget, which is eager to please big business interests and says nothing about other kinds of corruption: private practice by state-paid doctors, bribe-taking by policemen and politicians, evasion of sales tax. Like his colleague, the industries minister, he seems to be trying to divert attention from failures on his own ground to the sins of teachers, a subject guaranteed to produce heated argument. But the issue, whatever the government's motives in reviving it, concerns us all. The proposed ban has already been fiercely opposed, both by supporters of private tuition, and by equivocators who call the ban impractical. Adherents of the Left Front have a long history of double standards on this question. The higher education minister is curiously silent, while the minister for schools has been vocal. The secretary of the anti-Left West Bengal Headmasters' Association, Prithwis Kumar Basu, has said that, given the burden of prescribed syllabi and inadequate teaching, private tuition is indispensable. Teachers' bodies controlled by front partners are more circumspect in public, but their consternation is barely concealed. Even hypocrisy is proving difficult to sustain. Open dissent was apparently voiced in the recent meeting at the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-controlled All Bengal Teachers' Association office, though formal statements 'welcome' the government's move while wanting to stall it. The proposal of the West Bengal College and University Teachers Association secretary, Anil Bhattacharya, that the government should confer with teachers conceals the knowledge that when college and university teachers accepted the Mehrotra commission payscales in the Eighties, they were debarred from engaging in private tuition. Teachers in government colleges are forbidden to teach privately by service rules, while universities like my own have statutory provisions against it. Despite these prohibitions, private tuition has flourished unchecked. If the ban is unenforceable, should it be abandoned? This is the logic of despair. Difficulty of enforcement is not an argument of principle, merely of circumstance. Cheating in public examinations was also common in the Sixties and Seventies. It required political will to control it, but largescale cheating has now declined. Most important, it is no longer publicly sanctioned. It is on this issue of public sanction that the battle over tuition has to be fought. Every year, after the publication of state secondary and higher secondary examination results, we are treated to the spectacle of top-ranked students listing their private tutors (at least five for the five main subjects). This year, one candidate has pronounced that one cannot gain a place in the top ten without tuition, a view that will be slavishly noted by aspiring achievers and their parents. It has already been cited in the current debate. If true (and it was not true in our time or even now for other boards), this reflects the kind of assessment that rewards conformity. Tuition itself indoctrinates schoolchildren to think that they cannot learn well independently, and it is unsurprising that the habit should continue into higher education. What do students gain from tuition? There is a difference, first of all, between taking help in an area of specific weakness, and the edge that high achievers seek to gain over their fellows by means of coaching. Private tuition has long exceeded the need for remedial assistance. At every level today, from primary school to the MA classes of reputed universities, coaches are engaged for the highest achievers to do still better: that is, earn higher examination marks. The well-tutored pupil produces the right examination answers, especially when coaches influence assessment. In a largely free education system, parents are willing to spend sums in thousands in the final school years to ensure high examination marks. It is the beneficiaries of precisely these monetary investments whom we later see in our universities agitating over a 24 paise rise in library fines or any projected increase in fees. But that is a different story. Surely it is time to point out that contrary to public perception, private tuition does not actually improve a reasonably intelligent and capable student. Only in the most limited and local context (rather than in higher education or at the all-India level) will it improve examination performance. Most private tuition, which encourages the learning of rote answers and set methods, is intellectually deadening (and incredibly time-consuming). It encourages dependence, stops one from reading and thinking, and removes both the desire and the ability to solve problems for oneself. Are the products of this system really the state's 'best' students, the intellectual cream of Bengal? Boringly coached, narrowly focussed, few apart from the exceptionally persevering or gifted do as well when they reach university. On the whole, at higher levels of education, it is the independent intellect, the th- oughtful, if wayward, mind that is valued. What teachers gain from the system of private tuition is evident: very large sums of money in undeclared income. Half a century ago, before salaries went up, extra earnings from tuition may have been necessary. This is no longer true; simple greed rules the present market. Stakes are high: the top coaches can name their price and get away with teaching large groups in small spaces, mining infinite riches from a little room. The biggest schools in the city are full of horror stories about how pupils are compelled by persistent undermarking of their papers to take tuition from recommended tutors. While pupils acquire dependence, parents begin to think they have failed in their duty if they have not bought expensive educational supplements, like daily doses of Complan, for their children. A well-known university teacher of English, a member (before he was remo- ved) of various examination committees, ran a flourishing coaching practice until his death, boasting to his intimates of government patronage. No student would testify to paying him for tuition: they had too much invested in the system to want to imperil it. They wanted the benefits as much as he wanted their money. This remains true of students who fill up coaching classes run by the 'top' tutors in English, physics or mathematics, to the extent that when one such person was recently arrested for abusing his wife, the girls in his coaching class agitated for him to be released. There are far more honest teachers and enlightened parents than there are honest politicians, yet the public debate about tuition remains crippled by guilt, anxiety and a sense of complicity. The system touches us all: every middle-class parent has given hostages to fortune. Such is the anxiety generated by school education today that very few can hold out on principle against their children taking tuition - though some do. The government's move will not deter the corrupt teacher, just as it cannot stop parents or students from buying illegal benefits. Ra- ther, it should make us re-examine the false premises on which tuition rests, and change teaching and assessment. Only in a more open climate can we begin to cultivate genuine intellectual ability and achi- evement. This we must create for ours- elves, independent of punitive legislation. The author is professor of English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta