One of the fall outs of entrance exam centric system in India is the over-reliance on tutors, and almost elimination of belief in self-study. May be the fear of being left out, and high stakes of the entrance exam game, are justified reasons for parents and children to fall in line with the tutorial college model.
This often continues into engineering, medical and other under graduate education. Where grades and pedagogy in many colleges – including IITs, NITs and other premium institutions – is centered around class room sessions by professors and assignments linked to the curriculum at hand.
In all of this we are not creating the space for our children to learn to learn. And self-learn. I would argue ability to learn is a capability in itself. And a muscle to be developed and nurtured.
In fact, with new sources of learning that cover a topic from different angles and with different styles, self-learning is much easier and fun. When were younger to learn a concept in Physics we had to introspect on the subtle language in a reference text book (like Halliday & Resnick Principles of Physics) or practice innumerable ‘hard’ problems to test our understanding. Very few teachers or peers had the ability to debate, clarify and illustrate the concepts. Today our children can watch first principle based videos from Khan Academy, watch fun experiments that illustrate the concepts memorably by an MIT professor like Walter Lewin or go deep innumerable channels like Veritasium.
In fact, the process of researching a topic from various sources and angle to form your own mental model and understanding is the most powerful capability every child needs to hone in life.
Majority of situations they will face in life, will fit into the artificial tutorial college model of reverse engineering to an entrance test. And in not encouraging our children to rely on themselves to learn, we may be crippling them for life.
Same is discussed in a previous post Understanding Constructionism
Learning thru real life problem solving 