Cram schools seem to be popping up everywhere. Korea has them as does Flushing, Queens. The newest market? India. But where Korean schools are a post graduate addendum to improve university entrance exam scores, Indian cram schools are a high school addition. The goal is admission to one of the highly selective Indian Institutes of Technology and the cram schools only teach what will be on the test: math, physics and chemistry.??Traditional Indian public schools are complaining that the best and brightest are leaving their ranks for these schools (uh, hello? maybe these students are leaving for a reason?). On top of it all, these students still have to graduate from high school--while attending cram school at the same time, it seems.??
Local schools [in Kota, the cram capital] also have benefited: Cram students have to attend regular classes so they can pass their high-school exams and graduate. Some high schools have early morning classes so cram students can finish early and move on to cramming.??
Kota is in the throes of natural urban renewal as a result of the cram schools' popularity. The hoards of students need places to live, supplies and meals to keep them going 18 hours a day. It's like a cramming industry... or, cram-dustry!??
But on a more serious note, everything about these schools would seem repulsive to the American education worldview. Teaching to the test? The horror! Teenagers studying from 7am to midnight? The outrage! Ignoring literature, foreign languages, music and art? Crisis! But do these schools work? Seems so. Students graduating from Bansal Classes, the grandaddy of cram schools in Kota, are being accepted to the IITs in droves. And what does a degree from IIT mean? Admission to the educated elite. (And it must be noted that the Wall Street Journal??claims IITs are statistically more difficult to gain admission to than either Harvard or Cambridge.) Most importantly, these students are choosing??to go to these schools; they want to spend hours upon hours studying to get into these colleges.??
It's highly unlikely we'll be creating American cram schools anytime soon (although SAT prep seems to come to mind on that score) but it would be rather refreshing if we witnessed the same drive to excel as appears in our Eastern neighbors. This isn't about replicating the extreme education vision we see in India; it's about how much education is respected--understood--as the ticket to success. I know there are a host of other problems facing our country right now, but do we really need another Sputnik to see the renaissance of education as a top priority?
