Introduction

For centuries, organization of educational processes in Russia and elsewhere took on different forms ranging from private tutoring and home schooling to the modern forms of institutionalized schooling. However, after the emergence of national states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries education became a public concern. Since then, the relationship between public and private forms of education came to be shaped by rules and regulations. Furthermore, today public education is largely acknowledged as the most legitimate form of organizing education (Baker, 2014; Meyer, 2006). This idea has permeated modern societies to such an extent that - unless initiated or permitted by the state (e.g., public-private partnership in education, charter schools, etc.) - alternative forms of educational provision (e.g., home schooling, private tutoring) may be illegal or recognised only as supplements. 

Given the obvious superiority assigned to public education nowadays, it comes as no surprise that until recently private (supplementary) tutoring, or shadow education as it is often referred to, was virtually non-existent in educational research. In the meantime, as Bray (1999) pointed out, just like a shadow could help tell the time of the day, shadow education can reveal the main features of public education. I would however add that what is defined as shadow education also indicates what is regarded legitimate versus problematic form of education and what is considered appropriate boundaries between the public and the private.

The study is a part of the ongoing PhD project, which seeks to explore the changing relations between public education and private tutoring in three historical periods, namely, Imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The study focuses on the policy level and addresses the following questions: 

-       What aspects of private tutoring are problematized by different policy actors in different periods of Russian history? 

-       What beliefs and assumptions underlie the construction of private tutoring as a policy problem or a solution to a problem in different historical contexts?

-       What subjects are produced by different problematizations of private tutoring?

The present paper summarizes the preliminary findings and places contemporary problematizations of private tutoring in a broader historical context.

Theoretical framework

To explore the formation of policies on private tutoring the study makes use  of Michel Foucault’s (1991, 1994, 2001,) concepts of governmentality and problematization. Ultimately, an analysis of governmentality offers an insight into the dominant way of reasoning about what counts as a legitimate way of organising education and what kind of society and what subjects are to be produced by it (cf. Ball, 2010; Peters et al, 2009). Posed from governmentality perspective, the question of relationships between public education and private tutoring necessitates an inquiry into rationalities of government that constitute and legitimise the boundaries between them. These boundaries play a crucial role in distinguishing what should be governed and what can be left to the private domain. Central to Foucault is an understanding of governing as a problematizing activity (Miller & Rose, 2008). By problematization Foucault means an analysis of “how and why certain things (behaviour, phenomena, processes) became a problem” (Foucault, 2001:171).

By looking at policies as responses to specific problematizations of some hitherto unproblematic practices (cf. Foucault, 1994), the present study moves the focus from analyzing how “problems” are solved to the very politics of problematization, to the grounds, the limits and the presuppositions of a policy (Rose, 1999). This approach is in contrast to most research on shadow education which treats private tutoring as a given policy problem and aims at examining, evaluating or suggesting solutions to it.

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of problematization Carol Bacchi (Bacchi, 1999, 2009) developed a methodology of what she calls “post-structural policy analysis”, also known as What’s the Problem Represented to Be? Bacchi (2009) suggests that in order to make politics visible and to understand how governing takes place it is possible to take a policy as a starting point of analysis and to “work backwards” by deconstructing “the premises and effects of the problem representations” that policies contain (ibid.). Bacchi (2009) proposed an analytic scheme, a series of questions that guided my treatment of Russian policies on private tutoring. In short, these questions concern the deep-seated conceptual logic on which a particular representation of ‘the problem’ rests. How a certain issue came about as a problem and what presuppositions and assumptions are embedded in it? Further, Bacchi encourages us to identify possible limits and gaps of policy problematizations - what remains unproblematic and silenced? What conditions and power relations made a certain problematization resonate more than others did? Finally, a special attention is devoted to effects of problematization. Bacchi argues that it is important to reflect upon what objects, places and subjects are produced – made up or unmade - by a given problematization. The empirical sources used in this study were originally collected for my PhD project. In accordance with the logic of post-structural policy analysis, the data collection process started with an identification of key policy documents that regulate private tutoring in both historical periods (statutes, decrees and laws on education). These documents “fix” the problem by prescribing what is to be governed and how. After that, I searched for the documents that indicate the reasons, history and intent of a particular policy, i.e., why it should be governed (in a particular way). To this category belong, for instance, annual reports of the Ministry of education from the 19th century, transcripts of the USSR Supreme Soviet and Duma meetings for the Soviet and contemporary period, respectively. Lastly, to reveal policy silences and alternative problematizations and solutions I delved into public discussion of the corresponding policy agenda. For the Imperial period, this set of data consists of official letters to policymakers, public speeches and articles published in various type of periodicals. As for the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, the corresponding type of data is represented by national media coverage on major education reforms.

Private tutoring appeared on the policy agenda as early as the eighteenth century when it was seen as an obstacle for the expansion of public education. However, it was during the first decades of the following century that private tutoring became a major public concern. In the context of emerging nationalism, tutoring, which was provided mostly by foreigners, came to be perceived as a threat to the 'true' national values - Orthodoxy, Authority and Nationality. Accordingly, the relations between public education and private tutoring were reframed to represent a standoff between “the genuinely Russian” and an “alien other”. During the first post-revolutionary years, the process of nationalization, which had started in the imperial times, reached its apotheosis with the Soviet state claiming its responsibility for every citizen from their first years. In the context imbued with communist ideology, the question of “private” became a taboo. However, along with the gradual liberalization of the society after Stalin’s death private tutoring became a more or less natural part of everyday live for many Soviet people. The findings show that in Soviet Russia the dominant problematization of private tutoring in public debates was modified to focus on the communist values of collectivism, solidarity and uniformity. The turn towards market economy and privatisation in the late Soviet and especially post-Soviet Russia brought about new ‘problematic’ issues. In the light of neoliberal reforms, launched in 2000, the questions of uniformity and social justice in education, inherent from the Soviet time, have been adapted to the new conditions and re-articulated in the neoliberal language of standardisation, quality, competition and accountability. Accordingly, private tutoring came to be discussed primarily in economic terms as a concealed form of corruption, a part of the shadow educational market and one of the causes of economic suffering of public education.

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