A New Ratio for the Japanese Cram School

TOKYO — Yuuki Takano, an athletic sixth grader, hopes to attend a private junior high school with a strong soccer team after he graduates from his Tokyo public elementary school next year.

To help him pass the junior high school’s notoriously difficult entrance exams this winter, Yuuki’s mother, Asuka Takano, decided to place him in a traditional Japanese preparatory school, made up of big classes with dozens of students. The schools are often called cram schools, or juku in Japanese.

Mrs. Takano assumed her son would do well there, as she had attended a big cram school herself when she was preparing to enter a private high school.

But for Yuuki, 12, it was not so simple.

Many children in the cram school class had been studying there for a year, and the pace was too fast. The teacher in the large class could not spare the time to explain when there was something Yuuki did not understand.

Frustrated and unable to keep up, he asked his mother if he could switch to a cram school offering something different: private or semiprivate instruction with a smaller ratio of students to teachers.

This new breed of classes has been increasing in numbers in Japan over the past decade.

This worked much better for the Takanos, and since April, Yuuki and another student have been studying with one teacher for 90 minutes three times a week.