this thread should be thought of as continuation of a previous one why don’t East Asians deal with “computer addiction” by sending high school kids to cram schools?. To recap, in that thread we have established that a whole lot of Asian school kids do go to cram schools, that cram schools are real expensive, that cram schools often duplicate the school curriculum too closely so that students ignore their public school work and that many of them end up playing their fill at night anyway.
In this thread I would like to further analyze cram schools in light of the above. Let’s consider an alternate hypothetical type of “poor man’s cram school”. It’s basically a study hall to where the student reports after school for a several hours of working on his homework. There is no internet access, although possibly there is access to an intranet for some sort of instant messaging, project/study management web application and similar. Books unrelated to homework are not allowed. There are no highly paid experienced teachers, but there is a proctor enforcing general discipline and using crude applied psychology tricks to keep students somewhat motivated (in a shame culture it’s probably all the easier) while the bulk of the motivation originates basically from boredom due to lack of the usual distractions. So the student works on his homework for awhile, then goes home.
So from the standpoint of the parents while not a glamorous “respectable” school, it still would work as an institution that at least temporarily combats internet addiction and general lack of work discipline. Further, it would do it for what sounds to me like a pretty low price. (If there are aspects of this business IRL that would keep this from being cheap, please explain). Now, from student’s point of view it also should not be a bad deal - after all, by way of analogy, alcoholics are not proud of failing to do their work while drunk. Given that at least in the abstract the typical student would agree that “it’s good to do homework and get good grades” the above should serve as an environment that is both a lot less demanding than a real cram school and also quite conducive to getting him do the work without unneeded distractions.
Now, the simplicity and obviousness of the above suggest to me that really I am just reinventing the bicycle here.
Are there in fact such institutions in East Asia? Have they proven to be a lot less popular than the actual cram schools? Or do they, quite to the contrary, constitute a major chunk of the market but just don’t get as much mind share in Western news sources than the cram school as such?
I think you are mistaking the symptom and the cause. I know in China, home wi-fi is still unusual. I’m pretty sure that Korean gaming is still cyber-cafe based, and I know cyber-cafes have a much larger presence in Japan than they do here. It’s not mere access to the internet that is the problem. America has got to have the most pervasive net access in the world, but we aren’t quite as beset with internet addiction.
My personal opinion is that it’s a result of a communal culture based on social ties being thrust into the essentially individualist social organization of modern cities. East Asian people are generally raised with a different set of social skills, and it’s a set that, in my opinion, is difficult to adapt to the types of urban life that are prevailing worldwide. In China, at least, you were born and raised into a very clear social sphere, and you could expect future friendships to be fostered in very structured ways- either among classmates (who you would take all of the same classes with through all your time at a school), or through workmates (it’s not unusual for work units to still organize outings and social activities- even stuff like arranging movie tickets,) and other formal structures.
It’d be very unusual to go to an American-style party where you mingle with strangers, for example. Friendships come about differently. It’d be rare to have a fairly intimate talk with an essential stranger. It’d be rare to form ties with someone you don’t have a social context for.
And I think a lot of online gaming addiction is based on this. Young people are finding themselves in essentially anonymous cities, but often without the set of social skills that lets you make good on that. Online gaming becomes a way of being with people without having to “be” with people, which kind of makes up for this.
You can’t just combat the outward manifestation of this without looking at the root cause.
There are study rooms where you can go and study in little cubicles. Silence is enforced, of course, and it’s a lot cheaper than going to a cram school. People still want teachers who can help kids study specifically for the college entrance exam. As I said in the other thread, it’s more about knowing the trends than just pure studying. The questions for exams are picked anew every year, and there are trends that they follow - it’s not just random. Burying your head in a book by yourself is not going to help you with that.
But kids in Korea don’t have a “general lack of work discipline.” Are you kidding me? These are some of the most dedicated students in the world. The addiction to gaming has more to do with the incredible pressure these kids face over their college entrance exams.
HazelNutCoffee, got it, so this model does exist but is ill-suited specifically for the needs of entrance exams takers. That makes sense.
WRT to discipline, well, if games create periods of low discipline (like, when you are playing) that already is a concern if the parents are interested in optimizing the work effort, sleep time etc.
even_sven, I am not interested in combating any “root causes” or other windmills that may or may not exist depending on who you ask. I am interested in specific objectives e.g. getting homework done, or studying, or sleeping, or whatever. How much homework gets done and how many hours of sleep happen per day - such things have an indubitable, measurable reality behind it in a way that the non-falsifiable communal structures adapting to anonymous cities just don’t.
I can’t fathom what non-cultural reasons you imagine account for the fact that a handful of countries have high incidences of net addiction when most similarly connected countries do not. My particular analysis is based on experiences actually working in cram schools and actually working with game-addicted youth. It may not be spot on, and if you have something to add or argue go ahead. But no, I am not going to stop spoiling your speculation about what you imagine things might be like in Asia with my real life experience
your real life experience of what? Of communal culture adapting to anonymous cities as the root cause of something? Or of your students enjoying playing games? Or of fathoming the global questions of why some people like to party and get drunk while others prefer playing Starcraft?
Where did I even bring up speculations about how things are in Asia? I am discussing the specific issue of how cram schools work. And how they could be made to work differently, in case there are market niches that are yet unfilled. In the case of this specific thread, as HazelNutCoffee explains, the market niche I described does exist and is filled, but is not popular for reasons described upthread. So I would say that this discussion has been fighting ignorance at its finest - whereas your speculations about root causes, not so much.
I have nothing but respect for your experience with the specifics of day-to-day operations of cram schools, public schools, cyber cafes etc. I start such threads precisely to learn more about that (both in the “here and now” aspect and in the hypothetical, i.e. “what would happen if we do so-and-so and/or why isn’t so-and-so being done”) and not about the root causes, global problems, lasting solutions and similar.
I can’t imagine why someone would pay to send their child to a “school” where they’d sit in a room and do homework when they could just sit the kid down at the kitchen table and say “No computer until you do your homework.”
FWIW, I used to teach English in Japan and it was not my impression that the average Japanese schoolchild needed even less free time.
I do personally know at least one (non Asian) parent for whom this sort of option would have worked great. Playing stare down games with your teenage kid is not for everyone, and then people need to go to work too instead of hanging out at home monitoring homework.
That, I guess, raises a somewhat hijack-ie but very relevant point that it may make more sense to seek to innovate in underdeveloped markets, such as America or some other affluent country without a strong tradition of cram schools, rather than in over-saturated markets as in Asia. I guess it did work for Kumon, and presumably there are many other unfilled market niches remaining.
OTOH, a mature saturated market may be a very good place to be when you bring in a product that is distinctly superior than the competition for some market niche since at least you don’t have to convince people that they ought to buy anything in the first place.
But when you say “market niche”, are you thinking of anything someone is willing to pay for regardless of whether it’s a good solution to the ultimate problem of education?
If your goal is to actually solve the problem of education, setup a “good” school that does not require a cram school. A “cram school” is clearly a symptom of a broken educational system.
While plenty of Japanese salarymen don’t get home until after dark, the average Japanese mother is at home when her children are at home. Few Japanese women have both children and a professional career. (Many do work part-time jobs during the day, though.) It was not my experience that Japan suffered from an epidemic of children unwilling to do their homework, or mothers unable to supervise them in doing so. Japanese schools also tend to assign less homework than you might think. Students are expected to spend a lot of time studying, but they usually don’t have a ton of take-home assignments.
This isn’t to say that there are no slackers at all in Japan, but I would expect little if any market for a commercial study hall. Parents who are concerned about their children’s academic performance and have the money for outside help are going to send them for tutoring, cram school, or other private lessons.
Raft_People, are you joking or something? Obviously “market niche” usually means people being willing to pay for something. What they are paying for need not be the perfect Endlosung to whatever ails them, but presumably it does enough good for them to be willing to keep paying. Like maybe get the kids to do homework. Or something.
What does the broken, useless and wasteful American educational system have to with any of that, if I may ask? Why even bring it up in this thread?
You seem interested in two things- the market for cram schools, and East Asian internet addiction.
You really, really want to connect these two, but the connection just doesn’t exist. They are separate phenomena, that have about as much to do with each other as American ballet schools have to do with Oxycontin addiction. One is not the solution for the other. You’re not going to be able to make that connection.
As for cram schools- there is just a lot to learn before you can say “Hey, I have a brilliant new idea about cram schools!” and especially before you start shooting down people who say your idea may not make much sense. Did you know that students generally enjoy their time at cram school and regard it as a relatively fun social venue? Or that Disney runs a cram school empire? Do you know the techniques that cram schools use to market their foreign teachers? Do you know much about the origin of East Asian pedagogic theory? Or how the field is changing?
Innovation is great, but there are plenty of resources, including many on this very board, who can give you an actual starting out point before you start defending an idea you made up by essentially imagining what cram schools must be like. There are about 1,000 “I taught in an Asian cram school” memoirs. Go read one or two and get the basics. It’s interesting.
As for game addiction, I’m sorry but it is a cultural phenomena. It may not be exactly rooted in my personal theory, but I’m 100% sure that I’m not too far off. If you want to begin to find solutions to this, you can’t possibly do that without understanding the forces behind it. You can’t just address the symptoms and pretend like the cause isn’t there. It’s like some random Chinese dude wondering why American doesn’t solve it’s obesity problem by handing out hula hoops.
even_sven, I am glad to hear that you discovered telepathy and figured out just what I am really interested in. Because, so far in this thread, I have focused entirely on the workings of cram schools - real ones, real but uncommon ones, imagined ones etc.
If you think that any time I want to study a new topic and come up with some hypotheticals about it to discuss on the forum I should go read 1000 pages of text not available online for free, thanks for the suggestion. I think I will pass.
In any event, I think we are talking past each other. Maybe it takes a different type of personality than yours to focus on the topic’s nitty gritty without getting completely sidetracked by preconceived ideas. Notice that whereas I do a lot of editorializing in my posts as well, yet I generally stay on topic. You could censor out my editorializing and still the post would read like an intelligible response to the topic rather than an effort to explain to everybody that the topic is not worthy of discussion because of some hard to verify claims. And I certainly don’t start playing thought police with what the OP poster was really or not really interested in.
I was trying to figure out if you were trying to create a product that actually solves the problem at hand, which in turn has more staying power, or if you didn’t really care about that and just wanted to find a way to make some money regardless of whether that product actually solves the basic problem of education.
Just because someone is willing to pay for something doesn’t mean it’s a good or effective product.
If your goal is to simply take 1 broken model and alter a portion of it to make money great, just say so, I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t bring it up, you did:
Which also brings me back to my point: you state you are trying to innovate and yet you contradict yourself by saying you are thinking of introducing a non-innovative and clearly broken system of “cram school”.
Why do you think a “cram school” method of education is good?
What research have you studied showing this is an innovative method of educating?
RaftPeople, “innovation” in the business context can be introducing something unusual into a particular market. Even if the something is very usual somewhere else. Opening a cat cafe Cat café - Wikipedia in Manhattan should qualify
I don’t think it useful to spend much time dwelling on the “problem of education”. Different people understand the ideal school education differently. Regardless of how they understand it, most of them don’t have the money and the connections to start a school. And the ones that manage to have all that will quickly find themselves forced to do stuff the way government wants it done. Which is also a solvable problem for some statements of the overall problem, but my point is, it is all real complicated even to imagine for an American programmer type of guy.
As far as your criticism of the cram schools go, I wouldn’t disagree with that. Maybe they are a bad thing from some standpoints. Maybe they are a good or indifferent thing from other standpoints. And you are right, a successful cram school is certainly a way to make money, at least in Asia.
I will also point out that many things that are known to be “bad” nevertheless have a potential of improving given investment of intelligence and resources. E.g. “medicine” was the worst fraud in the book for centuries. They sold false hopes, and they killed many people with dumb treatments, e.g. bleeding George Washington to death. Moliere, among many other authors, made fun of doctors and found a ready audience. And yet, in time some smart people who wanted to get things done in this field found better ways of doing things. So while there may still be plenty of fraud in medicine, it is no longer fraudulent in entirety, and indeed many aspects of it are valid and wonderful.
Well, so the same logic could apply to cram schools. While public schools are most likely a fully lost cause for a host of reasons, maybe some interesting breakthroughs will eventually emerge out of some of these marginal, poorly regulated institutions that are not too preoccupied with only employing “highly qualified teachers” who faithfully follow “the research-proven best teaching practices”.
Well, this is all very philosophical. But it is also good to fight my ignorance on the question of how things that I have never dealt with directly and that are not well described online operate.
Education in each country is a complex topic - but if you are talking about public schools in the US, instead of writing a big long post with lots of different points I will make just 1 point that hopefully shows you can’t just generalize, you need to dig in and understand the details:
International studies have consistently shown that similarly performing students in Japan outperform their US counterparts in math computation - but the US students outperform the Japanese students in problem solving.
Yep, “studies have shown”. There you have it. What else is there left to ponder in this world of ours? The studies, they have shown, dammit!
Frankly, RaftPeople, from a programmer I would have expected a more coherent attitude towards discussion. Why did you cite this tidbit of info in this thread? What do these alleged studies have to do with Asian cram schools or with hypothetical alternative cram schools, or with public schools? And what do I care for how good or poor are the Japanese at problem solving? Maybe they suck at it so much that even Americans beat them. Maybe they are so great at it that American superiority is a cause to celebrate. But what do I care? What makes you think I give a damn about anybody’s prowess in problem solving? And what does this have to do with anything I have said, or anybody else has said, so far in this thread?
