God! I hope both WhiteHat Jr. and their parent company Byju's crash and burn. They are crap companies which make poor and gullible parents enroll their kids in one of their programs for extortionate amount of money. If the parents cannot afford to pay all at once, they give a "loan" to the parents and collect a part of it each month even if the kids aren't satisfied with the education that is being provided. Note that none of the kids in India use these apps as the only way to study. They attend regular schools and use these apps as an additional source. Byju's employs 1000s of people whose only job is to go visit as many houses as they can and trick the parents into subscribing for their services by falsely claiming that the only way their kids can succeed is when their education is supplemented by these apps. Many innocent people who want to do all they can to make their kids' lives better fall into the trap and then keep paying the "loan" amount back which could be a substantial part of their monthly income.Meta and Disney invested a lot of money into these companies and they use it to bully anyone who tries to bring these issues up by shutting down their YouTube channels and filing defamation law suits [1,2]. The entire online education industry is unregulated and resort to shitty antics to extort money. I don't understand why these companies need to exist when we have other free and amazing resources online like Khan Academy which teach all topics to all ages of people.
[1] https://thepost.co.in/news/633/whitehat-jr-lawsuit-pradeep-p...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/search?q=pradeep+poonia&restr...
kamaal|3 years ago
Cram school culture, FOMO and dreams of children making it big.
These apps are just a part of the larger culture where IIT cram school tuitions are supposed to begin at age 11. Every one in India likes to diss on Engineering education, but it continues to remain the most predictable way of making an upper middle class living.
Parent obviously spend good money on education for this reason.
rmbyrro|3 years ago
I too wish this didn't exist. But I'm learning to replace wishful thinking with something better.
In this case, I think reality is providing a valuable learning opportunity to those parents: that they should verify everything before taking as truth, and only believe as an anticipation of goodwill only during the period necessary for verification (to avoid ending up pessimistic or cynic, for instance).
While there are still people that didn't learn and apply these lessons well, there will always be Byju's out there...
ClumsyPilot|3 years ago
What they need to be provided is a good layer, and a clampdown on corporate fraud.
geodel|3 years ago
nr2x|3 years ago