WHEN A Cambodian teenager filmed himself lambasting his high school, the country argued about his manners. Was he disrespectful? Ungrateful? The boy had stumbled onto something his elders prefer not to discuss: in Cambodia you often cannot finish the state curriculum without paying for it.
The mechanism is the "extra class", or rien kuo. For four or five hours a day, children attend free public school. Then, frequently in the same building and taught by the same teacher, they pay for the lessons that cover the rest of the syllabus. Will Brehm and Iveta Silova, in a study of Cambodia's "hidden privatization", conclude bluntly that "a mastery of the required curriculum is now possible only through a careful combination of public schooling and private tutoring", and that only those who can afford it "receive access to a complete national education".
The habit is near-universal at the top of the system. A survey led by Mark Bray of the University of Hong Kong found that 75% of ninth-graders, and 90% of pupils in their final year, were paying for tutoring; mathematics alone accounted for four in five of those classes. Nor is this extra help at the margin. A study of 138 lower-secondary schools by Jeffery Marshall and Tsuyoshi Fukao, published in 2019 in the Comparative Education Review, found that the widest gaps in test scores were not between rich and poor pupils as such, but between those who attended the paid classes and those who did not.
The money does not spread evenly. Mr. Marshall and Mr. Fukao found that the income from extra classes is concentrated in a small group of better-credentialed teachers, who out-earn their tutoring peers. Pupils who cannot pay are not merely left behind after hours; the same study finds evidence they suffer during them, as material migrates from the free lesson to the paid one.
The consequences run deeper than exam results. A system in which a child's progress tracks the household budget cannot easily serve as a ladder for the poor; it more often greases the slide for the rich. Cambodia's government is not blind to this. Its Education Strategic Plan for 2024-28 promises equity, accountability and inclusion, with particular care for the marginalized. The words are admirable. The difficulty, as ever, is making them true in the classroom rather than on the page.
That is why the video matters, not for the boy's tone, but for what it lit up. Perhaps his manner sound inappropriate, but another important point is whether Cambodia is willing to make its public schools genuinely public for the children who cannot afford a second, paying track.