Juku

Gakushū juku (Japanese: ; see cram school) are special private schools (primarily in Japan) that offer lessons conducted after regular school hours, on weekends, and during school vacations.

Juku attendance rose from the 1970s through the mid-1980s; participation rates increased at every grade level throughout the compulsory education years. This phenomenon is a source of great concern to the Ministry of Education, which issued directives to the regular schools that it hoped would reduce the need for after-school lessons, but these directives have had little practical effect. Some juku even have branches in the United States and other countries to help children living abroad catch up with students in Japan.

While new media have been introduced into juku as instructional and delivery methods, traditional teaching is increasingly shifting to individual tutoring. This shift is partly a response by the supplementary education industry to declining numbers of children and the threat this decline poses to their industry.

There are two types of juku, academic and nonacademic.

Academic juku can be roughly divided into categories.

As of 2011, almost one in five children in their first year of primary school attend after-class instruction, rising to nearly all university-bound high schoolers. The fees are around ¥260,000 ($3,300) annually.

Academic juku offer instruction in the five required subjects: mathematics, Japanese language, science, English, and social studies. They are best known and most widely publicized for their role as "cram schools", where children (sent by concerned parents) can study to improve scores on upper-secondary school entrance examinations. However, as seen above, there are also juku that provide supplementary education, whether remedial courses to help children falling behind in their studies, refresher courses to explain material in further detail, or courses that cover material on a higher level and thus appeal to children bored by the standardized class structure.

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