The yells of children pierce the night, belting out the elements — “Lithium! Magnesium!” — as an instructor displays abbreviations from the periodic table. Next, two dozen flags stream by as the ten-year-olds shout out the names of the corresponding countries. Later they identify 20 constellations they have committed to memory. Timers on desks push older students as they practise racing through tests. The scene at Seiran Gakuin, a juku or crammer on the edge of Tokyo, repeats itself nightly at 50,000 juku across Japan.
Seen as a brutal facet of Japan’s high-speed post-war growth, crammers are as powerful as ever. Almost one in five children in their first year of primary school attends after-class instruction, rising to nearly all university-bound high schoolers. The fees are around ¥260,000 (Rs.1.68 lakh) annually. School and university test scores rise in direct proportion to spending on juku, often a matter of concern in a country that views itself as egalitarian. The schools are also seen as reinforcing a tradition of rote-learning over ingenuity.
Yet the sweatshop image is outdated. As Japan’s population declines, some schools are becoming a source of grassroots policy innovation, says Julian Dierkes, a rare expert on juku, who teaches at the University of British Columbia. Many juku operators were left-wing activists in the 1960s, later shut out of business and academia.
Their service is becoming more personalised, and many encourage individual inquisitiveness when the public system treats everyone alike. “The juku are succeeding in ways that the schools are not,” an OECD report says. In Tokyo, students say, they are a relief from cramped quarters, siblings, television and the internet.
Oddly, Japan’s education ministry refuses to recognise juku, dismissing them as mere service businesses. The powerful teachers’ union resists them on grounds of undermining equality. Meanwhile, the juku concept is being exported. Japanese operators are expanding to China and elsewhere in Asia. There, too, they may prove a response to broken state systems.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)