Rihaab Mowlana

In Colombo, you can’t drive ten minutes without spotting a tuition poster. Some are stuck to lamp posts with peeling tape, others are glossy billboards towering over traffic. Sirs with gelled hair and folded arms look down at us like movie stars. Their promises are bold - “100% paper coverage,” “Your ticket to A passes,” “Theory + Discussion + Results.” And we buy into them, willingly, desperately. Tuition isn’t the side dish to school anymore. It is the main course, served steaming hot and priced per head.

One mother told me she spends nearly half her monthly salary on her son’s classes. “We cut down on meat,” she said with a flat laugh. “Sometimes we skip eating out completely. But the money for tuition is non-negotiable. You don’t pay, your child falls behind. It’s that simple.”

That word - behind - hangs heavy. Parents chase tuition not because they believe in it, but because they fear exclusion. If everyone else’s child is carrying neat bundles of notes and mine isn’t, what chance does mine have? In school, lessons are skimmed and rushed, whole sections brushed aside. Teachers, starved by salaries that barely scrape 40,000 rupees, don’t hide where their priorities lie. In the classroom, they read through the book like newsreaders. At tuition, they are reborn - performers with jokes, energy, and booming voices.

The Empire Builders

The biggest tuition masters aren’t even teachers anymore. Not in the traditional sense. They don’t clock in at a government school and drag their weary selves to a private class in the evening. For them, tuition is a career. Full-time. Large-scale. They build empires out of it - lecture halls with sound systems, assistants at the back tracking attendance, photocopying units churning out branded notes with their faces stamped on the cover.

Their names are household brands. Parents don’t say, “go for chemistry tuition,” they say “go for his chemistry class,” and everyone knows who that is. Their posters are plastered on buses, their Instagram reels rack up thousands of views, and their motivational one-liners are clipped and shared on TikTok like celebrity soundbites. They aren’t teachers in the eyes of their students - they’re performers, influencers, sometimes even crushes.

This is not a side hustle to supplement a teacher’s meagre salary. This is the main hustle. And it pays. Some of these masters clear in one weekend what a school principal might not see in a year. Their cars gleam, their watches sparkle, their schedules are locked months ahead. Parents may roll their eyes, but they still line up at registration desks because, like it or not, these masters hold the keys to their children’s futures.

At this level, teaching isn’t about chalk and talk anymore. It’s about persona. The most famous masters are viral on TikTok - students post clips of them cracking jokes in class, and suddenly “Bio Sir” is trending next to a K-drama fancam. Some lean into it, running giveaways on Instagram or posting motivational reels with slick editing. They’re less educators and more influencers, complete with fanbases.

Childhood for Sale

Meanwhile, schools themselves have become waiting rooms - places for prefect boards, cricket practice, and attendance registers. The real syllabus is taught after hours, in halls crammed with 200 students balancing paper bundles on their laps. It’s a paywall model, and every parent knows it. Free education is a national slogan, but real education has become subscription-based. Pay to learn. Pay again to revise. Pay once more for the “special seminar” right before the exam. If you don’t, your child walks into the paper already disadvantaged.

The cost isn’t only financial. Childhood has been sold off in hourly slots. Kids tumble out of vans at 9 PM, uniforms creased, eyes glazed, still clutching exercise books. They have no time for sport, no time for play, no time for anything that doesn’t end in a multiple-choice question. One mother said when she suggested her daughter join netball, the girl laughed: “Ammi, Saturday is physics, Sunday is chemistry. When do I jump for a ball?” The sadness in her laugh was heavier than the timetable.

This is the quiet hypocrisy we all live with. Parents talk about how education is “the only thing no one can steal from you.” But here, education feels like theft in itself — of money, of time, of youth. Families bleed finances, children bleed joy, and tuition masters run their empires unchecked. And still, we pretend it’s normal.

Maybe that’s the cruellest part. Everyone knows the system is broken. Parents know schools don’t deliver. Students know their lives are schedules, not experiences. And yet, no one breaks the cycle. “Look, I don’t want to send my kids for tuition,” another parent admitted. “But do I really want to gamble with their future? If the whole country is doing it, how can I not?”

So we stay locked in this dance, whispering complaints while counting out notes at the registration desk. Tuition is not an accessory. It is the shadow government of education, the real Ministry, the one that gets results and BMWs. And until something truly collapses - until salaries rise, schools are restructured, or parents collectively rebel - the posters will keep multiplying, the halls will keep filling, the TikToks will keep trending, and childhoods will keep shrinking under the fluorescent lights of our other national curriculum.