ミッキー Blog #2

Hi everyone, Mickie here! Welcome back to our blog on Japanese education! We have been exploring different places around Tokyo together as a class. Diving into the culture and customs in Japan has been pretty overwhelming, but it is an amazing experience and we have only been here for about a week! Everyone has been really helpful and friendly at the Senshu i-house, an on-campus dormitory for international students living with Japanese students. Even though there is a language barrier, everyone is so understanding when conversing. We are all having a great time here.

In this blog post, I will talk more in depth about Japanese cram schools, also known as juku 塾（じゅく）. As mentioned in my last post, they are designed to help students excel in their studies, especially for exams. Students tend to attend juku during exams to aid them in their studying. They are private schools that offer lessons after regular school hours and are opened on the weekends and during holidays. So basically, when you are not attending regular school, you still have cram school.

For academic juku, though some students take regular cram school after regular school hours, students who need it usually take it when exams are coming up. Students can start taking juku as early as kindergarten, and it ranges all the way up to high school. It serves as a common study ground for those who do not have access to that kind of study environment, or have difficulty studying at home. Juku also provides extra help from sensei for students with questions about their homework or examinations. Entrance examinations are hard in Japan so students strive to study as hard as they can to enter their university of their choice. As Anki mentioned in her blog, Japanese entrance examinations determine the future for the students. Whether or not they enter into a good university and succeed depends on this exam into university.

Juku is not always academically focused, there is also non-academic juku which is essentially extra-curricular activities, such as: music lessons, art, sports, and many more. Non-academic juku is mainly catered to children. Japanese parents think it is a good attempt to exercise a meaningful measure of choice in Japanese education as they fear rebellious behaviour and bad habits that their children will pick up if they are not able to find something to occupy their time with. Besides restraining rebelliousness in children, juku also serves as a social environment where one can make new friends! Children will sometimes ask their parents if they can attend juku because their friends attend. So juku is not as bad as it seems to be!

Currently, I am in the progress of finding answers to my questions in relation to cram schools and how Japanese students feel about them, how it affects them, and the differences between cram schools in Japan and preparatory classes in North America. I will update my explorations in the next blog!