Abstract
In recent years, the education data collected by international agencies has revealed a phenomenon that concerns education in the extracurricular context: private lessons or shadow education. It was defined as private education outside school hours, which supports children and young people in their studies. Currently, it has been included among the most profitable industries in many countries especially in Asia where the phenomenon had the greatest expansion. Thus, it represents a new market related to education, emerging in the world economy. The phenomenon has been highly examined in South Korea and in the Asian countries, while there is scarce literature regarding Italy and other European countries. Given the relevance of the phenomenon it is important to understand its occurrence at the social level and whether it may be different across geographical areas. The goal of this paper consists in outlining the contents concerning private tutoring and the situation of the shadow education phenomenon in two different countries taking into consideration the different historical and cultural context. The focus is set on two prototypical countries, in both Europe and Asia: Italy and South Korea. Based on the 2015 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) document, data on contents of private lessons in mathematics in the two countries were analyzed through a series of chi-squared comparisons. Whether the content taught during the private lesson is the same as the one taught at school, it could be hypothesized that private lessons are given as reinforcement, repetition and recovery of what is done at school. Conversely, whether the content is different, private lessons could be conceived as an improvement of what is done during school hours. Among the main results, it is highlighted that most of the private lessons in both country focus on content regularly held at school. Regarding additional contents, it emerged that in South Korea they are much more common than Italy, 46.6% against 25.9%. The two countries differ therefore in the type of contents that are conveyed and therefore in their function. These results will be discussed to outline commonalities and differences between the two contexts taken into consideration. In particular, the results mirror the cultural differences to the approach of shadow education and suggest implications for the management of both scholastic and extra scholastic activities.