The first part of the article is devoted to the development of the definition of private tutoring – the third sector of education; research results are discussed in the micro and macro factors. The second part is devoted to selected negative and positive effects of private tutoring. Then, the third part presents the results of selected studies devoted to tutoring (teaching assistants), which are sponsored by the governments (or local governments, self-governance or autonomy) and, therefore, they are subject to the laws of the market. The presentation starts with an international survey “Monitoring tutoring”, in which nine countries participated: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Mongolia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. Studies were conducted in the school year 2004/2005. For education in Poland it was a special year – the last year of separation between the Matura (matriculation examination) and entry exams to universities, also the last year of the internal Matura exams. After analysis of selected results of “Monitoring tutoring”, discussed the research will be conducted under the School Self-learning Centre for Civic Education and the local “barometer tutoring” in Kwidzyn, a town of around 40 thousand inhabitants in northern Poland. The fourth part discusses the legal and institutional contexts of tutoring in France, Finland, the other Scandinavian countries as well as South Korean parents’ struggle for the right to decide about their children’s tutoring.
The text is a developed and supplemented record of many hours of conversation between Prof. Irena Wojnar, the oldest employee of the Faculty of Education at the University of Warsaw, and Dr. Adam Fijałkowski, the current editor-in-chief of “The Pedagogical Quarterly”. The authors focus on trying to characterize and evaluate the academic achievements of Prof. Czesław Kupisiewicz (1924–2015). On the basis of her own memories, Prof. Wojnar discusses the pedagogical views and organizational assumptions of Prof. Kupisiewicz – including his assumptions of pedagogy of culture and the humanistic education, the role of international cooperation, his role in publishing a series of books and journals.