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The officially recognized curricula for most boards till 12th grade mandate additional subjects that don't get assessed on pre-med or engineering entrance tests. You'd have to enroll your kid in a school anyway, and you'd need them to study subjects that aren't cram-worthy. STEM-track subjects are implicitly strongly weighted even inside normal schools.
Exams like the NEET/JEE also require that you graduate from specific accredited boards, usually government-recognized ones. Homeschooling probably doesn't count if you mean exclusive homeschooling without signing up with an "official" school.
Homeschooling is legal only after the age of 14, and how many parents do you think have the time for that here? It's not even super common in the States, where the existing culture is more favorable.
How are the additional subjects assessed? Is it “you must have done 200h of humanities”, or additional end-of-year exams?
My question is mainly, why don’t the coaching centres become accredited schools where you fly through the government mandated curriculum in like the first hour of the day, then spend the rest of the day on the important tutoring? If there’s lax schools where they don’t even measure attendance that well, wouldn’t a combined coaching centre + high school be possible and an immense success?
I think that’s kind of the US model of the prep school, and similar to the one I attended. On many occasions a teacher would sigh, say “this is for the official curriculum”, we’d fly through it in 15min, then they’d teach the actual insanely difficult material we cared about. As long as we passed the (very easy) annual official tests and bought the official textbooks, the teachers had more than enough leeway.
It doesn’t have to be administered by the parent, my thought was that you could have the same tutor you’d be paying for coaching at the start of the day, then you just need basic supervision to ensure they’re studying and not playing on their phones.
The is what Hong Kong does, where highly sought-after schools (ranked by their college acceptance rate) fly through government mandated curriculums and spend most of the time running exam or actual tutoring, with officially optional but in practice mandatory after school lessons from the very same highly credited teachers whose job based on student's standardized exam result, competing with their teacher peers within the same school, forming a highly competitive market between teachers.
Then, after these after school lessons, student can go to other private tutoring class where they finish their homework and get semi-personalized tutoring to fix their weakness or strengthen their strengths
A typical high performing student in there study from 8am to 7/8pm, with maybe a total of 2 hours in between
If you include all the prep work of teaching/tutoring, you realize this cannot be done by a single teacher per subject, and capitalism determined that running coaching centres with per subject enrollment is the equilibrium, as parents can select the best tutor and studying environment based on their child's characteristics
And then you have all of these magnificently qualified Hong Kongers who go to Stanford or Berkeley or Caltech or Columbia who come back to Hong Kong and work mid level back office jobs, at least in my experience, which I always find crazy. Maybe the good jobs all go to HKU or indeed Tsinghua grads but even a lot of them seem to end up in the middle leagues. Is it elite overproduction gone crazy?
It goes from upper middle class to lower middle class depends on qualification, due to the none existance of middle class safety net many choosed to remain in a middle class lifestyle with their middle class job instead of starting a business or joining startups
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No idea. I presume there are written standards somewhere, with each recognized board setting their own requirements and then getting signed off by the government. My best guess, without devoting more time to the question than I can afford, is both. Mostly the latter.
It's a big country. I've only attended one school, and that was well over a decade ago. It's entirely possible there are places like this, all I can say is that they're not the norm even today. There could be minimum teaching hours per subject, and pushback from the teachers who would feel miffed if they were only expected to conduct a single class on Shakespeare once a week for 5 minutes. Students and their parents aren't the only relevant stakeholders, teachers do have some degree of say in things.
See my earlier point about needing to have completed an accredited course through a school board before you're eligible for the college entrance exams. In practice, you need a school to sign you off for that. In the kind of school my younger cousin went to, attendance wasn't required. He'd come home early and attend private tuition. The best private tutors organized larger classes instead of 1:1 lessons, much more money that way. The distinction between that and "pure" homeschooling is academic.
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