Cram Schools: Immigrants' Tools for Success |
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Written by The New York Times |
Friday, 27 January 1995 19:00 |
(Original New York Times Article) By ASHLEY DUNN On a brisk Saturday morning, while most of their friends were relaxing at home, 16-year-old Jerry Lee and eight other Asian teen-agers huddled over their notebooks and calculators for a full day of math and English lessons. During the week, they all attend public schools in the city. But every Saturday, they go to a Korean hagwon, or cram school, in "I complain, but my mom says I have to go," said Jerry, a Stuyvesant High School student from Sunnyside, Queens, who has already scored a 1520 on the Scholastic Assessment Test for college, but is shooting for a perfect 1600. "It's like a habit now." Long a tradition in the Far East, where the competition to get into a top university borders on the fanatic, the cram schools of Asia have begun to appear in this country too, in Queens and New Jersey and Los Angeles and elsewhere, following the migration of many Koreans, Japanese and Chinese over the last two decades. In the last 10 years, the cram schools -- called juku in Japanese and buxiban in Chinese -- have become a flourishing industry, thriving on immigrant parents' determination to have their children succeed. Only a handful of cram schools existed here when the hagwon that Jerry attends, the In While the pressure to get into a good school is not nearly so extreme in the For some busy parents, the schools have become a kind of academic baby-sitting service. But most see them as a way of insuring that their children excel in spite of public schools that they perceive as lax and unchallenging compared with those in Since language and cultural barriers prevent many of them from moving easily in American society, they are willing to invest whatever is required to insure that their children, armed with diplomas from the best universities, will not face the same hardships. Tuition averages about $200 a month. "We try to make sure that our children have as much opportunity as possible," said Sung Kim, the father of an The rigor and discipline of the cram schools have even begun to attract a growing number of non-Asian parents who want their children to excel. "The Asian people are willing to invest in their children," said Miri Kessar, an Israeli immigrant who sent her 11-year-old daughter to a Mrs. Kessar, principal of the Woodbury Jewish Center Religious School on "It's like a hot iron on my heart knowing that my daughter is being introduced to this so late," said Mrs. Kessar, a In the drafty basement of an office building on They breezed through "ephemeral," "loquacious" and "effervescent," as their teacher, a graduate student in English at Columbia University, prodded them with rapid-fire banter that kept them laughing. They occasionally stumbled. "Voluptuous" drew a puzzled look from one student; "equanimity" was quickly defined, but one student said, "I don't know what they mean by 'evenness of temper.' " A voice from across the room piped up: "Cool." After lunch, the cheery banter died away during a three-hour lecture on mathematical matrices. The lecture went well beyond the subjects of the S.A.T. The teacher explained that the idea was not only to teach the students test-taking skills, as do places like the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Centers, but also to push the students beyond what they learn in public schools. Young Dae Kwon, director of the Mr. Kwon, an engineering graduate of "The kids are different here," he said. "Even Korean kids are different. They are much more talkative." Mr. Kwon came to the He started the school with just 16 students. Today, the school has about 400. The Japanese schools, such as The Chinese and Koreans, most of whom have come to settle in this country, have geared their cram schools to help students succeed here. At the Jeong Kim, an 18-year-old freshman at M.I.T. who attended the "Of course, I didn't like it too much, but my parents said go, so I went," he said. His father, Sung Kim, had gone to a hagwon in "In human life, there are certain periods in which we must do certain things," he said. "When you are in school, it is time to study." Mr. Kim graduated in business from one of the best universities in "I would never be doing this kind of work in After years of paying for classes at the hagwon, he now has one child in M.I.T. and another in Harvard. "I think it has paid off," he said. "They will be able to get any job they want." Photos: Asian parents who want their children to excel turn to cram schools like the |