Behind the Boom of Tutoring Centres: The Hidden Curriculum Rarely Discussed

Every year ahead of the National Selection Based on Test (SNBT), the same scene repeats itself. Social media is flooded with advertisements for ‘intensive programmes to pass state university entrance’, billboards for tutoring centres (bimbel) appear across cities, while thousands of students attend classes late into the night to chase their dream campuses. In fact, many tutoring institutions offer weeks-long study quarantine programmes costing millions to tens of millions of rupiah. This phenomenon shows that tutoring is no longer just a learning supplement, but has become part of a strategy considered essential to win the competition for university admission.

This situation arises as the quality of learning in Indonesia still faces significant challenges. The 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results show that Indonesian students’ achievements in mathematics, reading, and science remain below the OECD average. In fact, the 2022 results were among Indonesia’s lowest since participating in PISA. Only about 18% of Indonesian students achieved the minimum competency level (Level 2) in mathematics, compared to the OECD average of 69%. In science, only 34% of Indonesian students reached the minimum competency level, far below the OECD average of 76%.

These conditions lead many parents to feel that schooling alone is insufficient. Consequently, tutoring is seen as a solution to close the learning gap while increasing the chances of passing the SNBT. However, behind the bustling tutoring rooms, there is another educational process rarely discussed: the hidden curriculum.

This phenomenon can be explained through the perspective of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. According to Bourdieu, educational success is not solely determined by individual intelligence, but also by the possession of cultural capital, namely knowledge, study habits, communication styles, exam strategies, and self-confidence that are inherited and reinforced through one’s social environment.

In the Indonesian context, tutoring centres become spaces for the production of this cultural capital. Students not only learn subject matter but also acquire techniques for decoding SNBT question patterns, time management strategies, score-oriented thinking, and a strong culture of competition. All of this constitutes a hidden curriculum because it is never written in any syllabus, yet it is the most influential lesson in shaping how students perceive education.

Interestingly, this cultural capital is not equally accessible. While some students can afford intensive programmes, purchase try-out packages, receive mentor guidance, and access thousands of question banks, other students rely solely on school learning. As a result, the SNBT competition appears fair because all participants answer the same questions. However, viewed through Bourdieu’s lens, the participants enter the competition with vastly different levels of cultural capital.

OECD findings also show that socio-economic background is linked to student learning outcomes. In PISA 2022, around 43% of Indonesian students came from the lowest socio-economic group on an international scale. Meanwhile, students from higher socio-economic groups achieved better mathematics scores than those from the lowest group. This fact demonstrates that learning opportunities are still influenced by family social and economic conditions, not purely by academic ability.

This is where tutoring plays a role as an arena of social reproduction, as explained by Bourdieu. Tutoring does help improve learning abilities, but at the same time, it potentially widens the advantage for those who already have greater economic resources. Education thus becomes not only a space for learning but also a space for the unequal distribution of opportunities.

Therefore, the debate about tutoring should not stop at whether it is effective in raising scores or helping students pass the SNBT. The far more important question is whether our education system is moving towards a competition that increasingly depends on the ability to purchase supplementary educational services.

Tutoring is certainly not the cause of Indonesia’s low education quality, nor is it the enemy of schools. Its presence actually demonstrates that society holds high hopes for their children’s future. However, when academic success is increasingly determined by access to cultural capital obtained through paid supplementary education, we must ask whether education is still fulfilling its primary function as a space that provides equal learning opportunities for all.

Ultimately, the hidden curriculum behind the tutoring boom reminds us that education not only shapes academic ability but also reproduces ways of thinking, a culture of competition, and the distribution of opportunity. As long as this issue remains absent from public discourse, tutoring will continue to be seen merely as a place for extra study. In reality, it is also a mirror reflecting how social inequality operates subtly through the world of education, something Pierre Bourdieu warned about long ago.