While not everything has been said about Juku, obviously, I seem to have written about the results of my research to the extent that it has been suitable for a blog post and have no longer been adding new posts since April 2014.
I thank all readers for their attention very much and hope that you continue to find valuable insights about supplementary education in these posts.
In November the volume I co-edited with Janice Aurini and Scott Davies was published by Emerald.
I was recently interviewed by Ee-Seul Yoon (UBC Faculty of Education) about various aspects of the genesis of this book.
This interview led to an Asia Pacific Memo. (“The Global Intensification of Supplementary Education“, APM 271, Feb 18, 2014)
Two additional segments didn’t make it into the Asia Pacific Memo.
In the first, I spoke about what motivated us as an editorial team to put this volume together.
In the second, segment I talk about how ubiquitous supplementary education has become.
Thanks again to Ee-Seul for conducting the interview and to Paul Weston for filming and editing.
A guest post by Steve Entrich, Research Assistant at the University of Potsdam, Germany:
Who thinks that Japanese students should have gotten tired of juku classes by now is proven wrong. The hope to pass the difficult entrance examinations and get access to a prestigious university like the Tōdai (Tokyo University) and by this increase the chances to get hired for a desirable steady position in one of Japan’s big companies or government agencies, is a strong motivator for students to still give it their all. Following the unwritten rule saying that school education alone will not prepare a student sufficiently enough to let him survive in the tough business world students are more than ever supposed to take extra classes outside of school.
Nowadays parents are even told by their students’ school teachers to send their children to a juku in order to manage to get into the school or university they desire. As you can imagine foreign parents resist the idea of sending their children to take supplementary lessons at juku when they have to attend formal classes all day already – at first. In an interview survey carried out by Dr. Melodie Cook from Niigata University, which I had the pleasure to meet at a conference in October last year in Osaka, it was shown how foreign parents reconsider their view about juku. Despite having prejudices at first, in the end nearly all foreign parents enrolled their children at a juku.
When I was talking to Japanese (and non-Japanese) parents, researchers as well as juku owners one thing seemed to be consensus and commonly accepted: It cannot be helped, students have to attend a juku if they want to get a job. Therefore everybody has to accept the existence of juku and their function in the Japanese educational system. There is just no other option left for parents than to send their children to these private schools and invest a large extra amount of money for the children’s education. From a Western perspective it often seems negligently how Japanese educational policy gave way for the development of this system until it has become influential in such a way that it is perceived the formal school system alone is not able to fulfill its given educational mission anymore. In 2005 The Japan Times called it a “cash in on failure of public schools”.
In addition, the ones partly responsible for this and simultaneously beneficiaries of this system are, of course, the juku themselves. Surprisingly, the heads and leaders of juku are blaming the government for missing engagement in the education sector for so many years; they also explain their concerns about the well-being of the children. Here juku heads told me that they would like a change in this system as there was too much pressure on the students. The yutori education reform was not so bad one said, but carried out in the wrong way giving way for critics of the conservative forces resulting in increased pressure of students. It is considered too much weight on the small shoulders of students, if they first have to sit in school all day and following this, they have to attend their “second” school until nine or ten in the evening.
Nevertheless, a change might be coming in time said the leader of a big chain juku trying to paint a brighter picture. He finds it reasonable to believe that education as a whole might also be suspect to change in the near future including the private education and juku sector. Parents nowadays are questioning more for what purpose their children are studying, if there is no perspective for many of them after getting into university. The fundamental achievement principle might lose ground, since long given guarantees are not existing anymore. The strict organization of the school system is crumbling slowly due to the increasing internationalization resulting in a general, greater openness of education.
Still, until this change is starting to bear fruit students in Japan cannot possibly achieve their educational and career goals without the investment in juku – or so it seems.
Posted in Japan, Juku in Japan, Numbers, Steve Entrich
Exactly a year ago, Feb 3, 2012, I published an editorial in the Japan Times. I didn’t come up with the title, but it was called “Exam Forces Students to Cram Irrelevant Facts” [note that the Japan Times seems to have changed its archiving, but for now the article continues to be available].
Today, Feb 3, 2013, the editors of the Japan Times wrote a piece entitled, “Entrance Exam Change Needed“. Sounds like similar arguments? Yup, the thrust of the argument is virtually the same as mine, i.e. university entrance examinations in Japan test “test-taking skills at the age of 18 will be of little help later in a fast-changing society”.
While I could flatter myself that the editorial writers of the Japan Times re-discovered my year-old editorial, or that “great minds think alike”, what’s really going on here is that nothing has changed in the past year regarding the main problem with entrance examinations to Japanese universities, namely the fact that they don’t test anything particularly useful, interesting or relevant to future learning or societies real and imagined needs.
When I had published that editorial a year ago, most colleagues and other readers reacted with, “You’re totally right, but nothing is ever going to change anyway.”
I’m afraid that my reaction to today’s editorial would have to be the same at this point.
There are a number of reasons for this pessimism and no single factor prevents changes to the entrance examinations.
Obviously, Japanese politics and policy-making is not exactly in a particularly dynamic area in any policy area.
More specifically to education policy, any attempts at changing content are probably doomed as reformers have clearly been burnt by the fate of the yutori reforms ten years ago. These reforms had been motivated in part by a desire to make space in teaching for just the kind of things that one might see as more useful through project learning. To create this space, the volume of multiple-choice-testable “knowledge” was reduced. It’s this reduction that has inspired years of talk about the decline of academic abilities and led to a reversal of the reduction of content.
Reforms of this kind are thus currently not to be expected from MEXT or from national politicians.
What about the universities that actually set the exams? The multiple-choice format is obviously so well-institutionalized that no one can quite imagine an alternative or that everyone would be too scared of looking like they’re “soft on knowledge”.
An oft-repeated objection to test-formats that would focus more on analytical skills and understanding is that the setting and correcting of such exams is too costly given that university personnel is centrally involved in this process.
Where else could pressure come from? With declining student numbers due to demographic developments the funnel into tertiary education has grown wider and wider. Other than at the very top (national public universities, nationally prominent private universities) entrance to university is becoming less and less competitive. Ultimately, that might make the entrance examinations even less useful and thus exert pressures on universities to drop them entirely in favour of some other mechanism.
It could also be imagined that some of the best students and their families may recognize the futility of 受験 (entrance exam study) and opt out to pursue higher education abroad. This, however, does not appear to be happening given the many laments about the inward-looking focus of university-aged Japanese students.
All this leaves me thinking that we’ll continue to read editorials of this kind for the foreseeable future, even when most academics, analysts, and perhaps even readers might agree with the analysis.
Posted in Higher Education, Japan, Juku in Japan, Politics
Mark Bray and Chad Lykins have just published the definitive current statement on supplementary education in Asia, “Shadow Education -Private Supplementary Tutoring and Its Implications for Policy Makers in Asia” as a book (PDF, available for free) through the Asian Development Bank.
Here’s a paragraph from their introduction that offers a flavour of the book:
Private supplementary tutoring is widely known as shadow education, since it mimics the mainstream. As the content of mainstream education changes, so does the content of the shadow. And as the mainstream grows, so does the shadow. This study shows that shadow education has a long history in parts of the region, but in recent decades it has greatly expanded. In the Republic of Korea nearly 90% of elementary students receive some sort of shadow education; and in Hong Kong, China, about 85% of senior secondary students do so. Figures are equally striking in less prosperous parts of the region. In West Bengal, India, nearly 60% of primary school students receive private supplementary tutoring; and in Kazakhstan a similar proportion of students do so at the senior secondary level. Proportions are lower in other countries, but throughout the region the shadow is spreading and intensifying. (p. X)
Countries covered in the book include: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Georgia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taipei, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam.
The report was released just as co-author Mark Bray was awarded was awarded a UNESCO Chair professorship in Comparative Education. Congratulations on the chair and the publication!
Posted in Academic Literature, Cambodia, Chad Lykins, China, Hong Kong, Juku in Japan, Mark Bray, Mongolia
If you follow me on twitter you know that I recently spent some days in Tohoku with the intent of looking at post-disaster recovery from the perspective of juku as a small service-oriented business. I am now mulling over some of my observations from this trip in preparation for a March 15 presentation in a workshop organized by my colleague David Edgington at UBC.
During my visit, I was able to meet with 1o juku operators in the region, from Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures to Fukushima.
Here is a loose list of some of the things I will talk about:
Some of these observations will come as no surprise to colleagues who have conducted research on post-disaster areas before and I am still trying to organize these thoughts in a more coherent fashion.
An edited and more concise version of this post appeared as an editorial in the Japan Times on Friday, February 3, 2012, entitled “Stocking up on useless facts to pass an exam“.
I have been studying 学習塾 for over six years and have visited more than 50 individually-operated throughout Japan. I have been thrilled by the dedication of charismatic educators, and dismayed by the relentless focus on standardized test results and by the lack of a diversity of offerings beyond the narrow confines of the curriculum in an era of hypereducation.
Recently, thousands of students sat for the central university entrance examination (センター試験, see National Center for University Entrance Examinations). For ambitious students, the exam is merely a requirement to check off on their way to the entrance examinations for specific fields of study that follow later. For others, the exam is a convenient way to avoid multiple examinations if they are not opting for entrance to university via the increasingly common recommendation route (推薦). The exam is one of the ultimate goals that supplementary education through primary and secondary schooling focuses on.
When I read the exam questions that were reprinted in newspapers last week, I felt great dismay and a concern for Japan’s future. Despite the tremendous resources that the state, students, and parents invest in education, the linchpin of the education system tests knowledge that I – as a university professor – am not looking for in my students and that is unlikely to serve the Japanese nation and Japanese businesses in the postindustrial era.
Yes, for a student who will go on to a doctorate in literature, it is important to know whether Erasmus wrote before or after Cervantes and Petrarch (Q9 in the World History B portion of this year’s test). But this knowledge is only relevant in rare circumstances and does not speak to any kind of skill. The very nature of the exam – short answers selected from a list of options – pushes the education system towards a pursuit of only variously useful factual knowledge that is rarely linked to any communication and analysis skills. It is one of the great strengths of juku that they seem to prepare students well for this kind of exam. This may also be at the root of the consistently high ranking of Japanese students in international comparisons of educational achievement like PISA.
To make education more relevant to the skills of the 21st century, the core of its content has to be reformed. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) should initiate an experiment with a limited essay format that requires students in social studies’ subjects, Japanese, and English to provide an analysis of a topic discussed in a short reading or through the presentation of specific data. This experiment should be announced ahead of its implementation initially without an impact on students’ results in the first two years.
During this period of experimentation, MEXT and the National Center for University Entrance Examinations might also consider various options to provide the labour to mark essays, a process that is highly labour intensive, even for a short essay. Given the number of out-of-work PhDs, perhaps there could be a system of fellowships at participating universities that required fellows to participate in the marking of the central examination. It should be noted that many universities already provide the labour to grade the university-specific entrance examinations that come after the central exam, and these often include essay formats.
After some tweaking of the essay format, this critical thinking skills portion of the exam could be gradually expanded to take its place alongside the current focus on knowledge acquisition. The English portion of the exam should be shifted from testing arcane grammatical knowledge (受験英語) to an emphasis on communication paralleling the introduction of an essay format. With a long-term plan in hand, current elementary students could be told that the central exam will have changed by the time they will sit for it and this will allow them, parents, teachers and even juku teachers to adjust their teaching methods accordingly.
Through such a gradual transition, the central exam as the linchpin of an exam-oriented Japanese educational system could be transformed from its current role as an enforcer of test-taking English, arcane knowledge, and cramming strategies into a meaningful test of relevant skills and knowledge.
Following my recent post on abacus education in Japan, I feel like I have to report on my daughters’ (6 and 9 years old) encounter with the abacus here in Vancouver. They have been attending an abacus school here since September, going once a week. A very good friend of ours mentioned that her daughters were going to abacus and given my past experience with abacus schools in Japan, we were eager to try this out for our girls, especially the older one who is very keen on math.
They’ve taken to it like fish to water and go with great anticipation.
When I told my good friend in Japan who is quite involved in abacus education that the girls were going, he sent two “one-touch” abacus for the girls so that they’re all equipped now.
The school that they attend was recently at the centre of a story in the Globe & Mail.
Some of the things that I find fascinating largely based on my research on juku in Japan:
Interestingly, our teacher is the daughter of an abacus teacher. When I was doing research on juku in post-disaster Tohoku last week and mentioned that my girls were in abacus juku, some questions led to the observation that my interlocutor knows (of) our abacus teacher’s father. Small world.
An abacus juku that I visited in Sendai was a reminder of how astonishing abacus skills can be. Students there were doing something called “フラッシュ穴算”, i.e. flash calculations in their head. This is computer based and the program is pre-set to different levels of difficulty in the computations. A student will sit down and the program will flash a succession of numbers on the screen that the student adds, subtracts, multiplies or divides. For the younger students a series of four single-digit numbers might flash for a second each, while older students will be shown series of 10 3-digit numbers over a short time span. Amazing!
In her abacus article for the Globe and Mail, education reporter Kate Hammer picked up quite nicely on the amazing calculations, but also on the almost physical learning that the manipulation of beads seems to foster. I have found this a fascinating aspect of instruction in juku for some time and it is something that the correspondent for The Economist also picked up on in describing the rhythmic chanting of chemical elements at a juku he visited.
One of the most frequent question that is posed to me when I present my research on juku is: does supplementary education work? My two answers are: we don’t know, and it doesn’t matter for educational policy.
As to the first answer, we simply do not know whether various forms of supplementary education have any impact at all. There has been no careful and sustained research on this question that employs a credible scheme at controlling selection effects and we thus literally do not have an empirical clue.
Supplementary education advocates, especially if they are of the mind-set that the market and the introduction of market mechanisms “fix everything”, will respond that for-profit, fee-based supplementary education would not exist/continue to operate if it didn’t work.
That is not true, of course, and we might simply point to the large number of herbal and pharmaceutical remedies that lead a happy and profitable existence in the market place without any credible hints at their efficacy.
Just like health remedies, measurements of supplementary education generally only come after the fact. In the case of accelerated instruction, supplementary education is only tested at its very end point, often the sitting of a standardized examination. At that point in time, however, it is impossible to consider not having participated in supplementary education.
All the same arguments apply for specific tools, teaching aids, and pedagogies. While many of these are intuitively plausible (e.g., yes, I suspect that an engaged student learns more and faster, and retains more of the learned knowledge/skills), there is very limited research that employs control groups or proxies thereof in formal education research either.
Beyond the ethical questions of interventions in children’s education based on a randomized trial, the greatest hurdle would be that we consider so many different factors important in shaping education outcomes, that we would need very large samples that would be subject to very specific and well-defined supplementary education interventions to establish the beginning of a causal relationship.
But whether or not supplementary education “works”, the fact of its global growth is based on a wide-spread belief in its efficacy. Japanese parents do not seem to go through much trouble in informing themselves about a particular juku beyond word-of-mouth and trial lessons, as far as I can tell from my interviews with juku operators. Word-of-mouth and trial lessons obviously only provide an indication of efficacy, but no real measure thereof. Nevertheless, parents and their children are clearly willing to take a leap of faith and believe that these kinds of tutoring “work”, or more plausible, they are simply too insecure and nervous to question the perceived efficacy when they see all their neighbours believe in efficacy claims and do not want little Takeshi or Yumiko to fall behind.
The large-scale participation of students in supplementary education clearly has an impact on the education system. Whether this impact is primarily in skewing access to education, a distortion in classroom dynamics, or an introduction of quasi-streaming, the impact is very real in many countries that have entered into an era of hypereducation. For policy-makers who are concerned about the impact that supplementary education is having (and concern can obviously range from outrage to encouragement) the fact that supplementary education may or may not “work” is therefore irrelevant.
Posted in Efficacy, General, Hypereducation, Juku in Japan, Supplementary Education
Some of the arguments in the article “Japan’s cramming schools – A controversial institution has some surprising merits” in The Economist are being picked up elsewhere.
Liz Dwyer, education editor for GOOD, in her post asks, “Could ‘Cram Schools’ Be on Their Way to America?” and refers directly back to the article in The Economist.
I posted a reply:
Yes, juku-style “cram schools” are appearing in the U.S. Never mind SAT prep outfits like Kaplan, etc., but NCLB provides funding for tutoring services for students in schools that consistently underperform. It’s too early to tell whether these tutoring services will emerge as large juku corporations (local and state-specific registration seems to prevent this).
Note that supplementary education is not just booming in places where it is long-established (like Japan, but also Brazil, Egypt, Greece, Turkey for non-Asian examples), but in settings like France and Germany where it may be less associated with “cramming”. For now, this boom is focused on remedial tutoring, rather than accelerated instruction.
Note also that reliance on supplementary education is migrating with families.
[Note that I’ve added small parts of my reply that I had to cut to comply with the <1,000 chars req on their website]
I would add that I’ve previously posted about the curious fascination with juku-like institutions in Manhattan and elsewhere in the U.S.
Another place that the article is being commented on is by Roger Soder (apparently) on the “Education and Community” blog. This post takes the original article to task for its – supposedly – too rosy outlook on aspects of juku. While I would generally share the view that The Economist takes too positive a view of for-profit initiatives and the market (no surprise at this assessment and my agreement, I presume), in this case, I believe that this rosiness is due to the brevity of the article not necessarily an editorial stance.
I do always like to stress that juku should not be rejected as mere “cram schools”, but that there are many aspects of teaching in juku that are very attractive (some of the charismatic educators that run some of the smaller juku, for example), while other aspects are much less attractive.
