Holiday classes gain grounds despite official ban

Although there is an official ban on holiday classes, Douala is steaming with several ‘revision’ or ‘catch-up’ lessons being dished out in some tight corners, homes or schools. Since last month, a good number of students and pupils without uniforms have returned to school to study subjects of their new classes through paid vacation classes.

Text messages from proprietors and organisers are sent daily to phones announcing the onset of holiday classes in this or that corner. Some announce the opening of new evening schools, while some messages advertising such classes are written on certain walls across the city, reminding the public of the start of home-based studies for a group of students or pupils by ‘mobile’ teachers.

Particularly concerned by this practice are mission and lay-private schools in the metropolis of Douala, which can be blamed for paying little or no heed to the official ban on holiday classes.

Today, vacation classes are common among private individuals who offer lessons to students at home as ‘mobile teachers’ who teach in students’ or pupils’ homes; often in tight corners.

This practice, which has been going on over the years, has borrowed its strength and audacity from recognised private schools which have made the official decision a non-event. They sell the notion that holiday classes are ‘catch-up’ classes for the weak or a strategy to advance the strong in class. Most who argue that holiday classes help students to study ahead of class pace, occupy idle holiday makers in conformity with the idiom that says, “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.”

A teacher offering holiday classes in one of the private primary schools in Bonapriso buttressed the argument for summer vacation classes. He expressed his conviction that vacation classes reinforce lessons, preventing weak students from forgetting what they were taught in school.

“We revise the course work of the previous year.” Education authorities of the Basic and Secondary levels, however, contest this fact. A communiqué from the Ministry of Secondary Education, as well as reinforcement orders by education authorities in Douala in the past few years preferred holiday activities like music, drama or theatre, sports, painting, cookery and craft, which encourage the use of imagination than the teaching of course work.