Shanghai PISA Results

Posted on November 12, 2011 by | Leave a comment

In today’s Globe and Mail Mark Mackinnon had a folio about primary and secondary education in Shanghai. This piece basically started with last year’s PISA results where Shanghai students scored highest among comparison “countries” to tell a story of a narrow focus on exams and test-taking. While the article describes the situation in Shanghai well and fills this description out with some interested quotes from officials, the situation in Shanghai as it is described will be quite familiar to readers from other hypereducation societies.

This also confirms my long-standing prediction that China is quickly headed to hypereducation on a national and thus massive scale.

One element in Mark’s article that I noticed was that he wrote that “In faraway North America, there was the usual handwringing that children there are falling further behind studious (and numerous) Asian kids.” I would contend that at least for Canada there was relatively little of that handwringing in part because participating Canadian provinces consistently do well on PISA and similar comparative standardized tests. This seems to have given the Canadian public a certain self-confidence that borders on the self-satisfied when it comes to the discussion of education elsewhere.

The other element I noticed in the article was that Mark didn’t mention the doubts about the results from Shanghai in last year’s PISA. PISA results have been subject to extensive methodological scrutiny in almost all participating jurisdictions. Some commentators suspect that some of the test-to-test improvements in students’ achievement are primarily the result of gaming the test system on the part of education authorities rather than of substantive improvements, especially when no policy changes have been implemented between test iterations.

One obvious methodological challenge with the Shanghai results is that these compare students in a single city (and one that can be assumed to be particularly resource-rich and filled with ambitious parents compared to the national Chinese average) to entire countries. This is also true of Hong Kong and Singapore results, of course, but brings with many fewer sources of variation in achievement through rural-urban inequalities, etc.

The Shanghai results in some ways seem so outlandish that it’s difficult not to doubt their veracity. 600 on math when the next closest score is 562 (Singapore) and other point differentials tend to be in the single digits between countries? Hm…

Finally, I couldn’t help but notice that Mark repeated the OECD’s claim that 80% of Shanghai students attend supplementary education. Little further information has emerged about this claim, though I suspect that most of it is in the form of private, one-on-one tutoring, but there have been numerous discussions about the pressure that this exerts on all Shanghai students. This, of course, will once again be familiar to parents and observers of many other hypereducation societies.

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Posted in Canada, China, Competition, Hypereducation, PISA, Press and Media

French “Prépas” as a Parallel to Juku?

Posted on November 4, 2011 by | Leave a comment

One of the most frequent reactions I encounter in discussions of juku is, “Oh, that’s an Asian thing!”. This is a silly reaction in so many ways, but one of the obvious flaws in this perspective is that juku-like educational institutions exist in so many places around the world.

One of the examples I have pointed to in the past without any in-depth understanding is France.

France is unusual in terms of its policy response to supplementary education in that it is the only jurisdiction I am aware of where juku tuition is explicitly tax deductible.

Partly on the basis of this tax advantage, the supplementary education industry has grown significantly in France and has become “big business”. It parallels some of the developments in Germany that Steve Enrich recently discussed. There have also been some corporate M&A activities involving companies like Acadomia that have been an element in the increasing Europeanization of supplementary education at the corporate level.

Another aspect of supplementary education in France are the “prépas”, however. The exact nature of these public schools that are sandwiched between secondary education and entry to the very peculiar grandes écoles is still a bit of a mystery to me even though I tried to learn more about this during my stay in Toulouse as a visiting professor in Spring 2011.

I have recently watched a documentary on the prépas that immediately called the atmosphere in some juku to mind. The documentary is very well-done in the tradition of more in-depth television reporting that is pursued in France, though I should disclose that the documentary was made by a very good friend, Jean-Karl Lambert.

One of the first things I noticed in the portrayal of Pierre, a student who was beginning his two years at the well-known prépas Lycée Hoche in Versailles was the apparent conviction of the direct correlation between (hours) input and success. Clearly, the prépas, like most juku and yobiko (which are more directly parallel to the prépas given enrollment after completion of secondary education) breed an ethic of the total devotion to studies required to success in a hypercompetitive selection to higher education. Jean-Karl describes the entry into the prépas as “methode shock” when students are confronted with a schedule that has one 2nd-year student note that she can go out from time to time, but that she has to watch herself in that regard. Interestingly, food is provided at the prépas in a cafeteria allowing students to be on site from early in the morning until late at night.

Note that entry into the prépas itself is highly selective. The Lycée Hoche, for example, had received 6,000 applications for the 400 seats in the 1st-year class. In the discussion with the prépas長 (“M. le proviseur”), Jean-Karl learns that in the selection the prépas takes the status of a student at the head of his/her class very seriously as an indication of the will to succeed. This is an attitude regarding competition and the required attitude that is also very frequently emphasized in Japan.

To present a more well-rounded portrayal of the prépas, Jean-Karl also included a brief portrayal of a student who dropped out of the prépas due to a lack of motivation and a depression of sorts. Finally, there was a segment on a private alternative to the prépas that made the resemblances to the Japanese situation even more clear in that the students considering this private – and so costly, perhaps, that the students as well as Jean-Karl were asked to leave when the discussion turned toward fees (though a student later discloses €10,000, for 3 hrs. of instruction per week) – alternative are in effect the equivalent of 浪人 attending a yobiko in Japan.

Clearly, the prépas – public as well as private – are a form of accelerated supplementary education that goes beyond the remedial focus of tutoring in much of Central and Western Europe. It is also a form of supplementary education that is firmly institutionalized.

Great reporting and in my mind clear further evidence that the growth of supplementary education is neither limited to Asia nor particularly linked to Asian values and attitudes.

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Posted in Country-Specific Posts, France, Hypereducation, Intensity, Media Coverage

Entrance Examinations and How They Distort History Education in Japan

Posted on October 31, 2011 by | 1 comment

Before I refocused much of my research on supplementary education, I conducted a lot of research and wrote a dissertation on history education in Japan and the Germanys. I published this research as a book last year, “Guilty Lessons? Postwar History Education in Japan and the Germanys“. While I don’t discuss supplementary education in that book at all, my research on history textbooks was in part an inspiration for my current focus on juku.

In the course of a major research project, there are a number of questions that get asked time and again, some virtually every time one presents on a given topic. For my research on history education, especially in the Japanese context (the book was comparative in nature and included a discussion of history textbooks in East and (West) Germany as well), one of the questions I frequently heard was, “Yeah, but no one reads the textbooks anyway, students only study for the entrance examinations and thus rely on juku materials to study history.”

As you can see right away, this was not really a question and it was typically posed in that dismissive “so what?” manner that we academics unfortunately pose so often to each other. Nevertheless, I took this question seriously and after having heard it a couple of times went looking for research on the portrayal of national history in juku materials/instruction hoping to be able to add citations for this literature in footnotes to at least address this question even if I would not be able to answer it properly.

Note that this is also a question that Philip Seaton raises in his review of my book for Monumenta Nipponica.

As I went looking for this literature, it quickly dawned on me that there was no such literature. While I found this astonishing – given the frequency with which this question was posed -, I assume that it was a bit of an oversight in the larger literature on juku and on Japanese students’ sources of knowledge in different elements of their education. No such luck, there is no sustained engagement with these topics in any social science literature in Japanese or other languages. This observation was one of the central insights that propelled me toward juku research.

 Kazuya Fukuoka’s Research on the Reception of History Textbooks and the Role of Juku

Kazuya Fukuoka is a political scientist at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia (U.S.) I met him some years ago at a conference that was hosted by the Hiroshima Peace Institute and organized by Mikyoung Kim and Barry Schwartz. Kazuya co-authored a chapter with Barry Schwartz that appeared in the edited volume that resulted from this conference, Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past (Palgrave Macmillan, August 2010), “Responsibility, Regret, and Nationalism in Japanese Memory”.

Kazuya has also just published a new article in the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, “School History Textbooks and Historical Memories in Japan: A Study of Reception“. In October 2011, the article was available on the Springer website as an OnlineFirst publication. Through in-depth interviews, Kazuya determines that the reception of materials presented in school, especially textbooks, is not a straight-forward mechanistic process, but that it varies significant across individuals.

One of the aspects that Kazuya focuses on in particular (yes, I’m finally coming around to the juku link in this whole discussion), is the role of “entrance examination hell” (no page# given in the PDF I obtained through my university’s subscription). In his interviews, Kazuya heard reports from his interviewees that contemporary history was rarely discussed in the upper years of high school because it rarely appeared on university entrance examinations, and that history/social sciences is primarily perceived as a subject that requires memorization.

Social Studies in Juku Instruction

What Kazuya reports on the basis of his interviews here confirms my experience in juku as well. First of all, social studies is relatively rarely requested by students/parents. The dominant subjects continue to be Japanese, mathematics and – in middle and high school – English.

When I have observed 社会科 classes in juku, they have largely reflected that same kind of encyclopedic quality that Kazuya’s informants mentioned and that also corresponds to the empiricism that I found to characterize history textbooks.

The one notable exception I have come across in my fieldwork is a small juku in Chiba where the 塾長 (who is very active in juku association circles centred on Tokyo) spends a fair amount of time using coverage of a specific theme in newspapers to explore current events and their linkages to the three social studies subjects.

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Posted in History Textbooks, Social Studies

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Guest Post: German Nachhilfe

Posted on October 20, 2011 by | 1 comment

A guest post by Steve Entrich, PhD Student, Univ of Potsdam:

 “Private Nachhilfe” or after-school lessons as given in juku-like institutions, private tutoring at home, and all other forms of supplementary education has been the focus of an annual debate in Germany.  Parents, education experts and politicians, who see this kind of “shadow education” as a result of shortcomings in schools, regularly express their concern about the growth of supplementary education.

Where once a school was able to guarantee children an education good enough to succeed in society, many parents now see the future of their children at risk due. The fear that the school system is not changing quickly enough or at least not in the right direction to meet the challenges of the 21stcentury leads to more private agitation.

Naturally, demands for responses focus on schools’ accountability. To do so, reforms of the educational system are necessary and were implemented over the past few years – mainly as a result of the bad performance of German pupils in PISA 2000. In general, PISA has led to an unbelievable amount of research activities.

What is often forgotten is the fact that research focused not just on the assumed failures of schools is needed, but also about Nachhilfe, which was also the topic of a lot of discussions.

For some years the German media is now bringing up the problem of Nachhilfe but except a few regionally specific social scientific projects no national or even comparative study has been carried out.

In the end, not all the debates about concerns towards this kind of education were pointless.

Finally, in 2007 the government reacted and the BMBF, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, commissioned a report. Shortly after, the selected private research institution, the FiBS (Institute for Education and Socio-Economic Research and Consulting), came up with a survey of over 169 pages summing up all the available data about forms of commercial Nachhilfe, data records about offering institutions and an international overview about comparable data including Austria, England, Poland, Japan and South Korea.

The survey was titled with: “What do we know about Nachhilfe? – Status and Examination of Research Literature about Offering, Need and Effect” (in German).

All in all, the education experts of the FiBS stated, that the current state of research was “fragmentary” or rather “confusing” (p. 12) and so a lot of work has to be done until we can fully understand how we – in political as well as societal terms – have to deal with this educational reality.

Clearly we will have to observe other Nachhilfe-systems around the world to see what concepts seem promising to us for dealing with Shadow Education. Sadly not much was done after the FiBS report was published. While I myself am in the middle of a research project about Shadow Education in Germany and Japan, not much is done in German research institutes to see what is going on in Nachhilfe-institutions. Just one thing seems to be clear: Nachhilfe – or however you may entitle this kind of private tutoring – is expanding all over the globe. Last year FiBS started a survey about Nachhilfe in the G8-States and found out, that the need for supplementary education of this kind is growing steadily.

One reason for this – Nachhilfe institution operators themselves said so – are the school reforms mentioned above, e. g. the structural reform of the Gymnasium, where students don’t need to go to school for 13 years altogether (including 4 to 6 years of primary education) but just 12 years. Pressure in school has intensified and so more and more students (and parents) look for help – and they find it. If you follow FiBS, 58 % of institutional Nachhilfe offers stated that the request for their private after school lessons has steadily increased over the past few years.

I still hope for more research activity in this field of study and am happy, that the BMBF has already included a section about out-of-school learning in the national report on education as a result of the FiBS report. We do know that Nachhilfe exists and is expanding; we just have to understand how to deal with this fact in the present and the future as well.

Links:

BMBF: http://www.bmbf.de/press/2289.php

FiBS: http://www.fibs.eu/en/index.htm

Bildungsbericht: http://www.bildungsbericht.de/zeigen.html?seite=8400

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Posted in Germany, Remedial, Steve Entrich

Competition = Excellence?

Posted on October 11, 2011 by | Leave a comment

In an editorial for the Globe & Mail on Oct 11, 2011 (“Alberta’s Education System Offers Lesson in Competition“), Tom Flanagan, a professor at the Univ of Calgary and presumed confidant of Prime Minister Harper, extolled Alberta schools for their status as higher ranking than “those of any other English-speaking jurisdiction in international tests of education competence”.

The editorial asks the question why exactly Alberta has been doing so well. This is a very worth while question to ask, even after considering whether standardized scores have much to say that’s meaningful. While many countries (who have done poorly, e.g. Germany, but also some who have done very well, i.e. Japan) are somewhat obsessed with PISA scores, these scores are largely ignored in Canada.

However, Dr. Flanagan hardly provides an answer to this question. He merely lists the many alternatives that are open to students and parents in Alberta. From the number of alternatives, Dr. Flanagan concludes that there is vibrant competition among these alternatives. By some unspecified leap of faith, he then concludes further that this competition must produce the excellence that is observable in Alberta.

It is this logic that underpins many of the arguments for supplementary education as well. Choice leads to competition among schools (or supplementary education institutions) which leads to excellence as only excellent options “survive” competition.

Yet, there is little more than apparent logic that speaks in favour of these links. Empirical evidence is scant at best.

For example, on charter schools, research in the United States has questioned whether such schools actually open up competition because geographic mobility inhibits further-away choices. Dr. Flanagan counters with bussing strategies in Albertan cities that bring options closer to interested students. Fair enough, yet ultimately the number of options that students and parents look upon as reasonable to consider is still very small.

Next, does choice actually produce competition and if yes, competition on what? The choices that Dr. Flanagan points to (from charter schools to various language immersion options) sound great and many of them would certainly be options that I would consider with my children (disclosure: my children are all enrolled in public French immersion schools in Vancouver), but few of these alternatives explicitly aim at pedagogical or outcome excellence, they seem to emphasize content options instead. By which logic does the presence of French or Mandarin immersion programs raise math achievement scores?

Some pedagogical alternatives do exist, of course. How do students and parents evaluate these options? Presumably on the basis of some kind of standardized testing and word-of-mouth. The latter is probably somewhat unreliable, even in smaller cities, but somewhat meaningful, while the former may be fairly reliable, but only meaningful for broad comparisons, much less so for the individual fate of a student within a given school.

It is precisely questions that emanate from a discussion about the role of choice and excellence that have driven me to research about supplementary education in Japan. Here’s an entire sub-education system that’s built around for-profit competition with no shortage of options and parents in metropolitan regions who are not inhibited at all about sending children 90 minutes on public transport to a specific juku. Yet, a diversity of options? Excellence?

The diversity of options is entirely restricted to a diversity of delivery methods (individual, small group, less and less large group, on-line, worksheets, etc.). There is virtually no curricular diversity in a supplementary education system that shadows conventional schools quite closely. The same holds for other countries where hypereducation has taken root, i.e. Korean or Taiwan in E Asia, or Brazil, Egypt, Turkey elsewhere around the world.

So in the end, I would certainly agree with Dr. Flanagan that choices, especially substantive and curricular choices for students are a good thing. However, I’m not sure what part, if any, of the observed excellence in standardized testing is due to the presence of choices.

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Posted in Canada, Competition, Diversity of Offerings, Hypereducation, PISA

An Era of Hypereducation?

Posted on October 11, 2011 by | 2 comments

In 2010 I wrote an Asia Pacific Memo that argued that “hypereducation” was the way of the future. In this Memo, I was primarily referring to contemporary education in South Korea as a hypereducation system, but also predicting that China was heading in this direction.

What do I mean by hypereducation?

Here are some aspects that define hypereducation:

  • private investment that approaches or surpasses public investment in education even when this public investment is substantial
  • a strong, collectively-agreed upon belief in the importance of education/educational credentials for intergenerational social mobility
  • a highly institutionalized supplementary education sector that goes beyond immediate and short-term concerns with remedial efforts or exam preparation
  • a broad lack of trust in conventional schools (including private schools) that flies in the face of empirical evidence that suggests a high level of achievement

What societies have entered this era of hypereducation? In East Asia: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. If you agree with my Asia Pacific Memo argument, then China is not far behind? Elsewhere? The island of Manhattan, clearly. I still know too little about non-Asian cases like Brazil, Egypt, Greece, Portugal and Turkey to be able to judge whether hypereducation is also developing in these countries. 

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Posted in China, Education, Hypereducation, Japan, South Korea

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Where to Meet Nice Supplementary Education Researchers

Posted on September 28, 2011 by | Leave a comment

For the most part, supplementary education research is relatively underdeveloped as an academic specialty.

Supplementary Education on academia.edu

A quick example: on academia.edu, six researchers have joined me in stating their interest as “supplementary education“. I don’t know any of them and six of them list their status as “independent researcher” which doesn’t bode well for someone setting out in an academic career. Is it on-going squabbles about terminology? No, it doesn’t seem to be as neither “shadow education”, “hypereducation” nor “supplemental education” have an entry. There are a ton of entries with “tutoring” as a word, but they are relatively unfocused.

Why No Subdiscipline of Supplementary Education Research

So why has research on supplementary education not established itself? Another way of asking that question is, why are there not more researchers interested in this topic?

For the years that my previous SSHRC grant ran, I was able to recruit a single MA student as an RA. I sent feelers out towards sociology as we as Ed Studies, but found no interest.

One reason for the sparsity of research is the relatively recent recognition of supplementary education as a phenomenon worth of academic study. In places like Japan, pundits and commentators have written about juku since the 1970s, but this has not led to a research literature. In most OECD countries, the current tutoring/supplementary education boom is a relatively new phenomenon and thus hasn’t attracted a lot of attention yet.

Also, supplementary education sort of sits between all disciplinary chairs. The good thing is that this means it is establishing itself as a genuinely interdisciplinary enterprise which is terrific. This interdisciplinarity not only means a variety of perspectives on the phenomenon (most prominently, perhaps, sociological, but a significant presence of ed studies and pedagogy, coupled with a smaller presence of anthropologists, geographers, economists, etc.), but also means a relatively greater proximity to policy.

Take the example of most education schools: If you look at traditional divisions within the study of education, you will find divisions such as primary, secondary, higher education, or life-long learning, but these examples already suggest that supplementary education doesn’t “fit”. For people focused on schools, juku seem to informal, for life-long learning types 塾生 are too young. That may be why research in this area seems to be coming from neigbouring disciplines rather than education itself in many cases.

CEIS as a Place to Meet

For some time then, the emerging community of supplementary education researchers has been struggling with setting up a centre to its activities or a regular place to meet. Following some discussions last year at the CIES meetings in Montreal, CIES seems to be emerging as a strong contender. Why? It is interdisciplinary, and highlights cross-regional and cross-national comparisons. While CIES is U.S.-based, it has regional and national equivalents throughout the world and a regular global meeting. It meets annually. It is of a nice size, i.e. big enough that participation always seems to yield new insights, but small enough that some lasting links can be built. And finally, it is a pretty friendly conference.

I am aware of several efforts to propose panels that will be focused on supplementary education in Puerto Rico next Spring. One proposal is anchored by Mark Bray of the Univ of HK who generally functions as the godfather to the emerging network of researchers, partly based on his long-standing work in this field, but also partly on his past role as past director of UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning which has given him a wonderful network of researchers around the world.

Hopefully I will be joining with Janice Aurini and Scott Davies – with whom I have collaborated in the past – on a panel proposal as well.

Further Institutionalization

Hopefully, regular meetings of some of the people in this emerging field at CIES will lead to further institutionalization in the form of a community of scholars to whom one can circulate work in progress and with whom one can collaborate on grant proposals and publications.

There is – as of yet – no journal or newsletter that focusses on supplementary education. Yet, there is a growing – albeit informal – network of researchers who focus at least some of their energy on research in this area.

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Posted in Academic Publication, Janice Aurini, Mark Bray, Scott Davies, Supplementary Education Researchers

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Juku Flyer Berlin I

Posted on September 14, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I’m branching out in my collection of juku flyers, this time to Berlin, Germany [thanks, Mom!].

Cover of a German juku flyer

I suspect that some people will recognize the design of this flyer as it is advertising the local branch of the juku that is probably THE most active internationally. There is not much information on the front of the flyer, except for a generically happy-looking, perhaps stereotypically German looking girl. The back of the flyer does contain a little more information. From the information it is clear that this particular juku is targeting primarily remedial purposes. This seems to be (still) generally the case in Germany and in most of Northern and Western Europe.

“Lernfreude” and “Konzentrationsvermögen” look like they are right up there with “Fahrvergnügen” in the canon of compound German words that have a chance at English adoption. In this case, they are referring to a “joy to learn” and “ability to concentrate” respectively. Departing a bit from the generically remedial script the second bullet point promises not only a “focus on weaknesses in learning”, but also a “targeted expansion of strengths in learning”.

An emphasis on the emotional aspects of learning (weaknesses) is also in clear evidence with such terms as “joy”, “confidence”, “relaxed approach to challenges”.

Finally, the flyer offers a no-cost two week trial period for newly enrolled students.

Back Side of a German juku flyer

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Posted in Advertising, Germany

Jukucho as Education Consultants

Posted on September 9, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Increasingly, the operators of small juku (塾長) seem to be offering themselves as education consultants to insecure parents. Whether this is also happening in the more corporate and chain jukus I don’t know.

What I mean by education consulting in this context is that operators of juku are stepping into roles that would have generally been taken on (whether in Japan or elsewhere) by parents or extended family. They are thus increasingly acting in loco parentis. Whether it is in instilling an appreciation for education itself in children or whether it is teaching manners, proper behaviour and generally socializing children, these are aspects of juku attendance of elementary school children that are increasingly highlighted by teachers and operators.

One area where the consulting function of juku is most obvious is in the selection of higher levels of education. With the introduction of school choice at the middle school level (throughout Tokyo and in many other parts of the country), parents of older elementary school students are increasingly facing such a plethora of choices that they are looking to professionals for help. This isn’t the kind of help that we sometimes read about for Manhattan where some high-priced consultant is meant to assist a child to get into a specific preschool or elementary school, but instead the jukucho are often looked to for providing advice on what school students might focus on in the first place.

There are some aspects of how parents are approaching school choice that seem to necessitate this kind of help. Geographical distance is not seen as an obvious criterion of selecting a school by many parents in metropolitan regions. At least it is not a criterion that trumps other criteria. This is in part due to the high reliance on public transport and the trust in students, even elementary students, to be able to rely on public transport for a commute to school that may stretch as long as 90 min. Another factor is that there seems to be less of a concern than I hear around me in Vancouver now or remember from my Berlin childhood, about enrolling siblings in the same school.

So, given the lack of constraint by geography or siblings’ prior choice, a Tokyo elementary school student could theoretically consider hundreds of schools as options. This is where discussions with the jukucho narrow the choices. Of course, practice entrance examinations already narrow the choices significantly in that the scores and ranking (偏差値) will have the student and her parents focus on a  narrow band of schools that fall near her hensachi score with perhaps one or two ambitious choices and a safety choice. Beyond this strictly numerical choice, however, jukucho offer their insights into specific aspects of schools. This goes much beyond the increasingly active attempts by schools to establish a profile for their offerings in an era of school choice, but includes such factors of the level of ambition of sports teams in a given school, the general atmosphere at the school (is this where cultural capital may be sneaking into decisions?), opportunities for student exchanges or common destinations for graduation trips, etc.

School Brochures at a Tokyo-Area Juku

Given the role of jukucho in dispensing such advice, many private schools are increasingly courting juku operators through various kinds of fairs. Some jukucho have also reported to me that they’re beginning to build on prior relationships with (predominantly private) schools that allow them not only to speak about some (somewhat local) schools with greater authority/inside knowledge, but potentially also to “get students into” these schools, even when their entrance examination result may have fallen slightly short of the result required.

Note that as far as I’m aware, none of these consulting services are for-fee. Instead they are offered as a service to long-attending students. But jukucho are clearly branching out from the “mere offering of courses” through such additional advice/consulting.

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Posted in Relation with Schools, 塾長

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Cultural Capital in/through Supplementary Education

Posted on September 7, 2011 by | 2 comments

Among educational institutions in contemporary developed countries, juku seem somewhat unusual in that they don’t appear to confer cultural capital, at least not in the classical sense that Bourdieu identified to be so important to class reproduction in Western Europe.

In Distinction Bourdieu proposed “cultural capital” as a helpful notion to understand intergenerational class-reproduction in postwar welfare states. If the state equalizes economic capital and safeguards workers’ rights and livelihoods to some extent, how come we still see intergenerational class reproduction, was the question he was addressing. One element in the answer was that education not only confers skills (human resources), but that it also confers prestige and subtle familiarity along class-lines that individuals can display (cash in on, to stay in the language of capital) at later stages. For example, highly-regarded secondary schools may not teach any content in a particular different way from any run-of-the-mill lycée, but students at these institutions (drawn largely from a class-homogeneous population) may be taught a curriculum that emphasizes highly-validated content or ways of talking about this content that distinguish graduates of such an institution.

{Note that this is obviously a very simplified and painfully simplistic version of Bourdieu’s concepts and their influence.}

High Cultural Capital in Juku?

While plenty of arguments can be made that cultural capital may be playing a different role in different cultural/national contexts and over time, this is one of the concepts that has clearly inspired a lot of research in the sociology of education over the past three decades or so.

Now, cultural capital and juku?

In their public and private self-representation, juku certainly don’t claim to be a place to acquire cultural capital, at least not of the high culture variety. Jukucho would immediately point to the predominance of standardized testing that would not make it possible for applicants (to higher education, to jobs, etc.) to display (and thus cash in) any cultural capital. There is also no evidence that juku attendance leads to lasting social ties of the kind that some secondary school and university clubs do (most famously baseball and rugby teams, for boys at least). This seems to be the case even though attendance at juku may stretch out over a much longer period (some time in elementary school through secondary education, and for some students on into higher education when they “return” to a juku as a teacher). So the immediate answer on (high) cultural capital would have to be, no, juku don’t seem to confer this.

Learning How to Learn

What about the kind of cultural capital that is more focused on study/learning skills. So, how to organize homework as opposed to knowledge of classical composers. Here, juku certainly claim that they are infusing students with cultural capital, specifically by teaching students how to learn. While the kind of learning that is being taught in juku with its focus on processing speed, correctness of answers selected from multiple choices, etc. is very particular, long-term attendance at a juku would certainly seem to reinforce this kind of cultural capital, and it is this kind of learning that may lead to greater chances at success at later stages in education that do in turn confer cultural capital, particularly the prestige associated with specific institutions of higher education. Takehiko Kariya (Oxford and 東大) has been arguing that learning capital is one of the crucial variables in Japanese stratification (see his Asia Pacific Memo for related arguments).

The Future of Cultural Capital in Juku

Juku will change in the future. From succession problems in small juku to a decrease in the competitiveness into higher education institutions due to the decline in the number of children, to some mild tendencies to broaden the access points to higher education, it seems like juku’s role may be declining in significance. Countervailing trends could be seen in the potential of juku to gain a more formal standing as alternative schools.

In terms of cultural capital, the greatest question may be whether juku will gain some kind of role as an arbiter of cultural capital. The current prominent role of three graduates of the Matsushita Seikei Juku in the Noda cabinet may be an example of such a role, though an exceptional one.

Another avenue for cultural capital to begin mattering more would be through a greater prevalence of admission to universities “by recommendation” rather than entrance examination. Perhaps some of the more well-known juku will gain the “right” to nominate students in the future?

Or, if students’ perception that the “real learning” occurs in juku gains in prominence, perhaps companies will begin hiring on the basis of which juku an individual attended?

This seems unlikely to me, but may be the case in the future.

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Posted in Cultural Capital, Relation with Schools, Social Relations in the Classroom, Supplementary Education

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