Water Festival. It is one of the biggest national holidays in Cambodia. All schools are closed and families gather along the river to watch the boat races. While some children stay at home during this important holiday, many are heading to school dressed in school uniforms and carrying their book bags. To a casual observer, this may seem an illustration of students’ unending desire for more education, sacrificing a rare holiday for an extra day at school. Yet, this is not the case in Cambodia. A full understanding of private tutoring requires a more nuanced approach.

The children heading to school on a holiday are a select few who can afford it. They are going to take private tutoring lessons from their own teacher. While factors surrounding this phenomenon are multiple and complex, two of the most obvious ones we observed today are overloaded curriculum and underpaid teachers. State examinations are based on an 8 hour day curriculum, but school days are only 4 hours. If students were to get a full year of education, they have to pay for private tutoring or else they fail. In fact, only 26 percent of all children make it to the 7^th grade each year. Meanwhile, teacher salaries are under US$50 per month, barely exceeding the poverty level. As one teacher said, “If I only teach at school, I die.” Therefore, to underpaid teachers, this becomes an opportunity to profit from the lost 4 hours of schooling.

What is paradoxical is that private tutoring helps – at least private tutoring that is done by some NGOs and international agencies – students catch up with the lost curriculum, but at the same time this perceived solution neglects the structural problem in public education. As one NGO representative commented on his program of offering tuition-free private tutoring to students who cannot afford teachers’ fees, “we are caught in a Catch-22”: on the one hand, private tutoring eliminates some of the corruption and equals the playing field for some students, but on the other hand it perpetuates the cycle of education failure and inequality in Cambodia’s schools.