Log in
A+ A A-

Private spending for education still at 5 billion euros

The crisis has cut family incomes by up to 40%, yet despite cutting budgets in other sectors, Greek families have only marginally curtailed the huge amounts spent on parallel education.

One of the aberrations, peculiar to Greece, is that despite the insistence of all parties that Greece has a public free education system, there exists a parallel structure of private tutoring, teaching the same subjects, to which most parents succumb, nullifying in practice the concepts of free and public education.

In the past this duplicity was hypocritically tolerated by all parties involved, but with family incomes destroyed by the crisis, more and more families are finding it hard to meet these extra-curricular educational costs.

Such tutoring can be at home by hired tutor, most often untaxed, or at private tutoring institutes called frontistiria. For the most part this tutoring is aimed at preparing pupils for university entrance examinations, foreign language learning, music, and aiding weaker students to get by. Very often the same teachers that work in government schools in the morning teach at frontistiria or offer in-house tutoring. One wonders why during public school hours children do not learn and extra-curricularly they learn, even though taught by the same people

As a recent study by the Center for Educational Policy Formulation of the General Confederation of Labor shows, Greek families spent 5.2 billion euros for tuition in private schools, frontistiria, home tutoring, and education-related services, in 2013, only marginally down from 2008, before the crisis, when they spent 5.6 billion euros. The study notes that while family incomes have shrunk by up to 40%, expenditures for services related to education has only fallen by 5.4%.

Recent years have shown a small decrease in the numbers enrolled in private schools, while there has been a decrease in fees for private schools, frontistiria, language schools, etc. Until 2010, such fees exhibited annual increases. Since that time foreign language schools have decreased fees by -7.9%, while for high-school level frontistiria the decrease stood at -13.6%, with prices reaching 2006 level.

The bottom line is that while families are staggering to remedy the deficiencies of the "free" public education system through their pockets, the words of politicians, unionists, and teachers about the people's right to free education are spoken in a moral vacuum, and in a vacuum there is no sound!