Education
Cram schools usually specialise in a particular subject or subjects. Cram schools that prepare students for high school and university entrance examinations are also frequently specialised to particular schools, and the staff may have access to previous years' examinations. Special cram schools that prepare students who have failed their entrance examinations (known as rōnin in colloquial Japanese) to take them the following year are also common. Such students may spend up to eighteen hours a day studying to retake their tests. Students who attend regular after-school cram schools may study four hours or more.
As the name suggests, the aim of a cram school is to impart as much information to its students as possible in the shortest period of time. The goal is to enable the students to "parrot," that is, to unthinkingly repeat, information that is deemed necessary for particular examinations. Cram schools are sometimes criticised, along with the countries in which they are prevalent, for the lack of training their students' critical thinking and analysis. However many believe that they are necessary to compensate for the formal education system's inability or unwillingness to address particular individual problems.
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Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The Supreme Court would have pleased me more if they had concerned themselves about enforcing the compulsory education provisions for Negroes in the South as is done for white children. The next ten years would be better spent in appointing truant officers and looking after conditions in the homes from which the children come. Use to the limit what we already have.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)