Cram schools do more harm than good
Does your child spend up to 12 hours a day at school? Yes? He or she is not the only one, however, as eight out of 10 third- and fourth-graders in Taiwan join after-school arrangements, such as day care, tutoring or cram schools, every day.
According to the Taipei-based Child Welfare League Foundation’s annual Survey of Elementary School Students’ After School Programmes, the number of respondents with after-school obligations increased by nearly 6 per cent last year, which is an even more worrisome trend.
Without a doubt, cramming is deeply embedded in Taiwan’s culture, where grades are considered essential for future professional success. Families have been hiring test-prep tutors in China for centuries, and modern-day Taiwan has taken this competition to new extremes as national exams can make you or break you.
The problem with keeping children at school for so long is that it is in fact pointless. Education experts suggest that you shouldn’t cram. It’s a lousy habit that is likely to see you drummed out of top schools thanks to bad marks. It’s indeed an ineffective study method, for a couple of reasons.
To begin with, children aged between 8 and 9 already face a lot of stress from school-related work. Cramming is just adding more stress to it. As tempting as it is to press your children to study hard seven days a week, they can’t. Their brains can only handle a little at one time, and if you try to get too much in at once, most of it will just bounce off uselessly and be lost. In other words, children’s brains are like sponges that need to absorb what they’ve been given at school first, before you try to get in more at a cram school.
By cramming, you’re also denying their bodies what they need to perform adequately every day: sleep. If they stay up until late with their brain churning, their minds will not only work ineffectively at night, but also on the following day – the body wants to go to sleep, so it will try to compensate the next day.
Even more worrisome, the Child Welfare League Foundation pointed out that the environment at many after-school programmes is not safe enough for children. Up to 26.8 per cent of the surveyed students cram at schools operating without a proper license, according to the same survey.
The foundation said the number of government-licensed after-school centres declined by around 24 per cent to 846 in 2011 from 1,108 in 2006. In contrast, the number of private cram schools, which are not strictly regulated, rose from 11,997 nationwide in 2006 to 18,962 in August 2012. Such private schools are commonly set up in small rooms and are not bound by teacher-student ratios.
Instead of sharing busy parents’ burdens in attending to children, after-school care centres are increasingly taking away the time parents should spend with their children. Parents need to spend “quality” time with their children and properly teach them important skills such as telling the time, tying their shoelaces and riding a bike.
To this end, the government, schools and employers should offer more flexible working practices for parents, not just during the first year of a baby’s life, but throughout their schooling years. If we work together, Taiwan will succeed in prodcuing happy and confident children.
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