ABSTRACT
Private supplementary tutoring probably has a history as long as that of schooling itself. For decades and even centuries, it has been a mechanism through which parents have sought to support and enhance their children's school performance, particularly in academic subjects. Until relatively recent times, however, it has been very modest in scale and mostly restricted to upper-class families. Private supplementary tutoring is commonly known as shadow education because much of its content mimics that in mainstream schools: as the curriculum changes in the mainstream, so it changes in the shadow. While the metaphor of the shadow has limitations, it is nevertheless useful and in this book will be employed interchangeably with private [supplementary] tutoring. Three decades of shadow education research have shown many dimensions that ought to be taken into consideration in policy-making and implementation, but policy makers do not always think in such frameworks.
