Cram Schools: Knowledge Without Learning - 補習班

by Charles DeBenedetto

(Billboards for various Taiwanese cram schools. Photo Credit: Taiwan News)

Sitting across from me, a little boy is dangling his legs and looking down. I sit up straight and ask him, slowly, trying to pronounce every syllable clearly, “How, old, are, you?”

“I am five years old,” he says quickly and fluently.

“Great. Okay, next question. What, do, you, do, after, school?”

He looks up at me and says “I go to the after school.”

To an American, you might think he goes to an After School Program where adults supervise while children run around, play games, and make arts and crafts. But this five year old boy, like many other Taiwanese children, goes to a cram school.

Cram school is exactly what it sounds like; being crammed with knowledge that does not engage critical thinking, but instead requires rote memorization on an astounding level. The word “cram” of course is very negative, and was probably coined in disgust by one of the first foreigners to see these “after schools” in Asia. But, in Chinese, the word is “buxiban,” which comes from the verb “to repair.” This is a much more positive term, implying that something went wrong in their normal education, and the buxiban can help them catch up to their peers. This sounds closer to our summer school.

But buxibans are not just for kids that are falling behind. Instead, everyone who can afford to go to a buxiban will go, and then the result is that the kids who cannot afford to go wind up being the ones most in need of “repair.” Kids go to buxibans for various reasons, but two of the most prominent reasons are (a) Mom and Dad need a place for the kid to be until they finish work, and (b) the child is under extreme pressure to perform well on standardized tests.

From sixth grade, students will take a junior high entrance exam which will impact their entire lives, then again in ninth grade for high school entrance exams, then of course in twelve grade for college entrance exams. In Taiwan, the public universities are the most prestigious and the cheapest as well, so testing well also means that the cost of your education will be more affordable. This means that, especially for kids from average-income and low-income families, testing well enough to earn one of the very limited spots at public universities is very high-stakes.

And so, even that five year old student goes to the “after school,” but only because his parents have the financial resources to do so. For some kids, cram school is not an option, and the result is that, in any classroom across Taiwan, the level gap between the cram school kids and the other kids is a chasm. Whenever I enter a new classroom for the first time, I know within minutes which kids are the cram school kids and which kids are going to struggle to keep up throughout their adolescence.

If you are lucky enough to go to a cram school, you have a very busy day. Even from elementary school, you will be in school from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00-5:00 p.m., before you go to cram school, some of which are open until 9:00-10:00 p.m. The end result of this is twofold. First, Taiwanese students have a lot of facts in their heads, yet they are not taught to critically think. From a very young age they can recite hundreds of English vocabulary words, but they cannot create original English sentences. Second, they are mentally exhausted. This creates students that either are very difficult to manage, because they have so much potential energy that ought to be spent playing, or are just so beat that they groan whenever they are asked to respond to a question or write something down. Eventually the quantity of time in the classroom is having a negative effect on the quality of learning.

So, if you are a foreigner teaching in Taiwan or a cram school environment like this anywhere in Asia, what can you do? We can start by acknowledging their test pressure, and recognizing the culture we are working within. Students need to be crammed with knowledge because, unfortunately, the tests that will determine their futures require that they are crammed. Parents expect their kids to be able to recite lists of English words because they believe that is what proper education is, so we need to provide that to an extent.

Yet, we also should try to be double agents, working within this system, but trying to fight it as well, for the good of the children. If you teach first graders, play a silly game with them that makes them giggle, because they still have many long hours to go before they can get home and squeeze in a few minutes of playtime before bed. If you teach older kids, give them opportunities to practice critical thinking, and when they stare at you in silence, persist. Tell them there is more than one possible answer, and let them work through the silence and apprehension until they finally begin to use parts of their brain that have until now been drastically underutilized. When they come to your class expecting a lecture, learn to shut your own mouth and get them to open theirs. The cram school system creates students who do well on tests, and until the tests change, we are going to have to work within that framework. But let’s also try to create students who not only retain facts in their brains, but use their brains, too.