Calls to legalize and regulate private lessons

The work of the fourth national forum dedicated to discussing the issue of private lessons in Algerian schools concluded with the necessity of legalizing this activity, the scope of which has expanded greatly and has begun to impose a new reality on the educational system.

Those involved in this meeting, which was hosted by the National Library, considered that there is an urgent need to establish laws that regulate this practice and define its framework so that it remains a source of public education and not a substitute for it.

In this context, Hamid Saadi, who heads the National Union of Parents of Pupils, pointed out that this phenomenon is no longer limited to the final sections as was the case previously, but has reached the very early stages of education up to first primary, which affects the child psychologically and socially and deprives him of his normal childhood after his day turns into a continuous journey between the section and the lesson centers.

The spokesman explained that the great expansion witnessed by these lessons has caused them to lose their pedagogical character and turned them into a trade dominated by bad practices and exploitation. The matter has even reached the point of organizing huge gatherings of baccalaureate students in large halls that include hundreds or even thousands of candidates, without any respect for educational standards or conditions for proper framing, and he described these gatherings as being closer to festivals than to lessons.

That is why Saadi called for updating the legal texts and framing this activity, especially since eliminating it completely seems difficult. He also called for preventing the organization of these lessons during official working hours due to the fact that they cause students to abandon the classes, especially baccalaureate students.

He drew attention to the issue of the repeated absence of students due to their enrollment in private lessons, recalling that the law requires the student to be dismissed when the period of permissible absences is exceeded. He also pointed out that enrollment in vocational training centers now requires a school certificate proving attendance until the month of June, which makes regular attendance of lessons mandatory.

For his part, Belbaqi Hassan, National Secretary of the National Union of Educational Workers, called for the necessity of organizing private lessons through a clear book of conditions supervised by the competent authorities such as the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Commerce, stressing that this will transform this activity from chaos into a supportive tool for the public school without compromising the status of the professor or the credibility of the educational institution.

Belbaki stressed that establishing a legal framework for these lessons will ensure equality of opportunity among students and control the conditions of practice, whether in terms of the pedagogical competencies of teachers, the places allocated for them, or the curricula followed, in a way that guarantees the quality of education, protects learners, and limits the commercial exploitation of education, while awaiting comprehensive reforms that address the causes of this phenomenon from its roots.