Abstract
The shadow education sector plays a centrally important role in the Japanese education system. Advocates of Japanese shadow education institutions, or juku, claim that the pedagogy employed in these schools leads to superior results compared to teaching methods used in conventional schools. The lack of value-added testing of juku results suggests that these claims have not been tested. In this article, I examine the background of the owner– operators of small juku and the challenges they face in hiring teaching staff. The small juku examined were mostly founded during the juku-boom of the early 1970s and continue to teach 100–200 students with a staff usually numbering more than 10 part-time or full-time teachers. I find that almost no operators or employees come to the shadow education business by design. Instead, owner–operators “slide into” their role for lack of alternative options, or through early success, or through frustration with previous careers. Subsequently, many of the owner–operators embrace their work as a pedagogical calling. In hiring teaching staff, owner–operators circumvent the larger employment market by hiring their own “graduates”.
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Notes
In Japan, this attitude has changed recently with surveys now reporting a majority of parents expressing some appreciation for the services provided by the shadow education system (Shimbun 2005).
학원—hagwon.
補習班.
塾.
I will use “conventional” as a term to distinguish official, accredited schools from juku below. Walter Dawson (personal communication) has reminded me that some private and even some public schools in Japan are bringing juku instruction into their schools now, a trend that seems to be accelerating and constitutes a new market development for large and small juku as well as eroding the distinction between conventional schools and juku.
学習塾.
不登校.
There have been some cursory surveys conducted by the Ministry of Education, but they have been very limited in terms of the scope of questions asked about juku. See for example MEXT (2008). Such surveys often do not distinguish between different types of juku or the intensity of juku instruction.
While I am continuing to seek out juku that are operated by women, this has proven to be difficult as such juku are very rare.
塾長.
個人塾.
I identify juku and their owner-operators by location and a letter. Bunkyo-ku is one of the 23 wards of central Tokyo.
Students who attended a juku until they moved to the next-higher level of education are generally referred to as 卒業生 (sotsugyôsei) or graduates, indicating the extent to which juku build a sense of communal belonging very much akin to conventional schools.
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Acknowledgments
This article is based on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Hirabayashi Kazuyuki for assisting me in the organization of research visits to juku. Michiyo Hayase provided essential research assistance. The editors of the special issue provided important comments to improve the article.
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Dierkes, J. Teaching in the shadow: operators of small shadow education institutions in Japan. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 11, 25–35 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-009-9059-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-009-9059-3