Across from the Taipei Railway Station, as the first lights of dusk come on, the streets teem with activity as pedestrians and cars shuttle back and forth among the shimmering neon signs. But more captivating is the contrast between this vibrant urban scene and the reality behind it.

As we proceed through the front plaza of the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store, scores of ads touting courses in English, civil service exam preparation, graduate programs in Western and traditional Chinese medicine, and securities licensing preparation pull us back into the utilitarian real world. Behind the windows and within the dark recesses concealed by the billboards are countless students immersed in study, hoping to prevail in the fierce competition of the exam rooms, achieving superb scores and bright prospects.

It is the June exam season. Drawing sidelong glances from passersby, a scrolling marquee on a tall building at the street corner proclaims, "Our class has set a new record for the supplementary education industry--20 students surpassed the minimum entrance exam score of 75!" In the mantle of the dark night, the Her Jer Educational Institute's swift, golden captions are like a constant war drum urging students to make the final sprint toward passing the 2nd Basic Competence Test.

The scene turns toward the Shoute Building, nicknamed the Cram School Building, which sits opposite the train station. Students of all ages file in, passing under a red banner hanging high over the entrance to the LearnSchool English classroom which reads, "High-school senior reading competition: NT$100,000 prize!" By the classroom doorway is a sign: "Anyone who disrupts class or disobeys staff will be expelled," summarizing the iron discipline of LearnSchool English. The auditorium-style seating in the classroom is packed with about 200 people silently reading and writing by themselves, a "drill instructor" in camouflage fatigues making rounds of inspection. On the blackboard, in large script, are the words "26 days to go" along with a list of 11 rules which, if broken, result in point deduction.

Exam venues are like battlegrounds in the cram school industry, and there are tests on a variety of subjects. But once the exam is over, few ever look back.

Go! Go! Go!

"The last month before the exam is crucial," says Liu Yi, who has been teaching in the supplementary education business for almost 30 years. "When students stay at home watching TV, chatting on the phone and eating, how can they concentrate?" At Liu's school, there is strict management and an atmosphere of collective learning from 7:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Some students who had given up and were planning retake the test the following year took one of Liu's classes for a month with a try-and-see attitude, and to their surprise made the top of the list in law departments.

During the exam season, cram schools offer up intensive prep classes and "boot camps" to boost students' skills, but even at other times, preparation cannot be neglected. Comprehensive cram schools have in recent years become big business, providing a dazzling array of choices and arrangements for "clients" from seventh graders to college entrance exam re-test candidates, with "products" from Chinese and English to math, science and the social sciences, single- and multi-subject curricula, and summer and winter classes, offered any time of day to meet the needs of students and their parents.

If parents examine the issue, it is hard for them not to be affected or even frightened: though ordinary schools offer half-day summer counseling in the long summer months, there is nothing to do the rest of the day, and parents fear that their children will waste the remaining time surfing the Net or watching TV. The crucial point is that, if everyone else is attending cram school and one's own children are lazing around at home, how can their grades not fall behind? Might as well send them to cram school.

According to the Ministry of Education, the number of comprehensive cram schools grew from 1,249 schools in 1997 to 7,195 in 2006, a 5.7-fold leap within a decade. Of those, over 4,500 are located in the major cities of the northern, central and southern regions of Taiwan.

Imposing street-side billboard ads and word-of-mouth messages about cram schools paint a rosy picture of the future for test candidates. Taiwan's cram-school culture is long-standing and well-established.

A national movement

It is not surprising that these figures correspond to the sentiments of urban residents. From a casual enquiry of exam candidates among family and friends, the invariable response is, "Pretty much everyone in my class goes to cram school." Usually seventh graders attend supplementary English and math classes, with more classes being added in eighth and ninth grade. By ninth grade, most students are studying five different courses at cram school. This means they attend evening classes Monday through Friday, not going home until after 10:00 at night, and then continue reviewing and studying on the weekends. They are constantly in top gear.

As students devote themselves to study in the pursuit of success, parents feel it in the pocketbook. For instance, the tuition for a full-year single-subject course exceeds NT$20,000 for students preparing to enter eighth grade, and the special rate for a four-subject package is NT$80,000. It is common for ninth-grade tuition to be well over NT$100,000. Even though many families must tighten their belts, each registration time parents obediently pay in full, and people even camp out overnight in line to secure a place in one of the top cram schools.

Why do so many want to go to cram school?

"My son doesn't understand anything his science teacher says at school, so I have no choice but to send him to cram school," says Mrs. Liang, the mother of a student at Jieshou Junior High School, one of Taipei's foremost schools. Mrs. Liang says she is a supporter of the idea of educational reform. Originally she did not want her son to go to cram school, but due to the inadequate quality of teachers she had no choice but to send her son to a well known science class nearby. She was astonished to see her son, who had been hopeless at science, keeping well-organized notes and showing a budding interest in the subject.

Hsiao Yang, an eighth grader from Hsintien, is attending after-school programs because his ordinary classes "don't offer a good climate for learning." He says many of his classmates just want to coast through vocational school. The classroom atmosphere is disorganized, and even though the teachers teach well, the students do not want to learn.

"Cram school inspired in me an academic interest in mathematics." Hsiao Yang says with a solemnity beyond his years. Moreover, cram schools combine a number of textbook editions, and have an accurate grasp of future trends in the Basic Competence Test. Although the rate of progress is different from that of regular schools, how is that relevant? Hsiao Yang, for whom the high-school entrance exams are now looming, disregarded his mother's advice--"Don't depend too much on cram school; use your own head instead"--and insisted on signing up for Chinese and social studies classes.

On a hot June day, hundreds of college entrance exam candidates begin studying quietly in a cool and well-lit lecture hall immediately after shouting a battle cry. A "drill instructor" in camouflage fatigues making rounds of inspection adds to the severe mood.

Hidden talent

The examples of Mrs. Liang and Hsiao Yang are not exceptional cases. One reason so many students attend cram schools is the tedium and difficulty of ordinary classes. In contrast, accomplished cram school teachers are skilled at their trade: their knowledge and showmanship are first rate, and they also employ special techniques.

English teacher Wang Liang-chih, who has taught all around Taiwan, uses various mnemonic devices for memorizing vocabulary. For example, using word association, he associates the word "phenomenon" with the phenomenon of a woman who turns "no men on," and breaks "isolate" down into "I so late," stressing that lateness is isolating.

Kao Kuo-hua's English class does not lose its efficacy amid its humor. During the three-hour lecture the teacher walks gracefully back and forth on the stage as he covers a dozen or so pages of topics. When giving lectures, he accompanies his elucidations of vocabulary and grammar with large, clear writing on the whiteboard, proceeding smoothly from one topic to the next without interruption or awkward pauses. The hundred-strong audience is captivated by the lesson from start to finish. But then, during a translation exercise on "Walking the dog in the park," some wisecracking students may say "walking the bird" (meaning "expose oneself" in Chinese), to which the teacher would retort, "If you 'walk the bird' at home, that's fine with me." Or if the topic is "Dad goes to the beach" and the students say "bitch" amid a chorus of giggles, the teacher would laugh, saying "Careful, or you might end up with hairy palms with your minds in the gutter like that."

"The rhythm of a lecture is important. The atmosphere can't be broken if we wish to capture the students' attention," says Kao. To maintain his rhythm he will keep talking even as the teaching assistant erases the blackboard, because once the venue is silent the students become distracted, and it becomes necessary to recreate the atmosphere, which costs time. As for off-color jokes that ordinary school teachers deem taboo, in these classes they serve, in contrast, as extemporaneous stimulants.

Kao has recently been promoting his Action Figures, a set of 100 individually molded figures including Superman and Michael Jordan that come with sets of matched Chinese and English sentences. Students receive one for each class attended, and five if they introduce a new student to the class. Collecting all 100 figures earns the student a laptop computer.

"I used to think cram schools were just out to make money, but I found from my daughter's experience that it's not necessarily the case," says Mrs. Chen, mother of a ninth-grade high school entrance exam candidate. She observed from her daughter's online chats with her teachers that cram-school teachers understand and accept the students' feelings. For instance, her regular-school teacher says that her English is "only good enough to pass tests," making her feel resentful. Her cram-school teacher would encourage her, saying "All your school teacher wants is for you to improve your speaking and writing. He hopes you can be better!" Mrs. Chen believes that the school teachers often hurt children with harsh criticism and sarcasm, but cram-school teachers know the importance of positive thinking, and to a certain extent play the role of mentor.

Even when cram school tuitions top NT$100,000 a year, students and parents must camp out overnight in line if they want to secure a place in the best cram schools.

Educational reform angst

"There's another important reason for the rise of cram schools: the great anxiety parents have toward educational reform--a complicated selection system for advancement to high school and college, multiple discrepancies in textbooks, and overly frequent and rapid changes in policy," says Prudence Chou, a professor of education at National Chengchi University. The educational reform launched over a decade ago aimed to empower people by loosening restraints on textbooks, curricula, exams and ideology, but because the scope of the reforms has been so great, there has been inadequate consideration of the people's fixation on being accepted into the top schools or the intervention of commercial forces, and all these good intentions instead bore ill effects.

For example, under the "one syllabus, multiple textbooks" policy, the contents of the different textbooks are laid out and ordered differently, and parents worry that their children would not learn fully enough and would not be able to integrate or draw conclusions from them. Although scholars repeatedly stress that it is possible for students to cope well with exams by studying from a single textbook, many parents and students remain apprehensive, and eventually seek the help of cram schools that claim to have a flexible topic-assignment style suitable for handling five or so books.

Test anxiety directed at the Basic Competence Test (the high-school entrance exam) and the General Scholastic Ability Test (the new university entrance exam) is another aspect. "Many parents look upon their own past experience with the old Joint College Entrance Examination when imagining modern entrance exams," says Chan Cheng-tao, head of the Department of Research at the National Teachers' Association. The idea that rote memorization plus multiple drills is the only way to achieve high grades is still deeply implanted in the minds of parents who grew up in the JCEE era, he notes.

Chan says that the current Basic Competence Test for Junior High School Students is well developed: "Only a third of the questions require memorization, while the other two thirds require comprehension and application." Thus, in any subject, if the concept is not thoroughly mastered, even with additional drills the student would not be able to attain high scores. But due to the limited number of school teachers with Basic Competence Test training, inertia from years of teaching, and exam models that are still not on track with the Basic Competence Test, such flexibility loses out to the cram schools, with their comprehensive inventories of exam questions.

"Parental anxiety is real," says Hsu Yueh-o, principal of Nangang Senior High School. Modern parents have high expectations for their children, but are too busy with their own work and thus do not have the time or energy to help their children with their studies. Intellectually they are aware that education should not be limited to grades alone, but they succumb to real pressure, making it difficult for them to look at education from a big-picture perspective.

Many teachers and educational scholars say that if cram schools can truly lighten the burden of parents and students and set their minds at ease, they are not necessarily impermissible; however, they also urge us to examine the effectiveness and the benefits and disbenefits of cram school studies and monitor whether they have harmful effects on children, mentally or physically.

To concentrate on test preparation, some people spend big money on cram schools and meet with classmates to study together at school. Pictured here is the Chien Kuo High School campus before this year's

Filling stations

Returning to the original intent of supplementary education, most experts in education believe that supplementary education to make up for inadequacies is not only not an evil, but is also necessary.

"In the learning process, inflating tires and adding water, metaphorically speaking, are unavoidable--we can't do without filling stations," says former Wanfang High School principal and educational reformist Chou Li-yu. From junior high on, knowledge systems become gradually more complex: if a previous concept is not mastered, then it is generally difficult to progress.

Taking junior-high math as an example, cram-school math teacher Chang Cheng explains, "If you don't master basic calculation skills--the four arithmetic operations and basic equations--you'll be stuck." And for students who do not understand linear equations with one unknown, comprehension of linear equations with two unknowns, simultaneous equations, functions and so forth will be affected. At this time such students need someone to lend them a hand, and once clear about one concept, they can easily master the next.

For example, English is an alphabetic language--if one does not master phonetics, understand how to distinguish syllables and stress, or have clear pronunciation, then simply memorizing vocabulary is bound to present great hardship. "Poor vocabulary means poor English," says Sam, a cram-school English teacher. If cram schools can help students build vocabulary as well as a "feeling" for the English language, it will boost the children's confidence and give them a sense of achievement in learning English.

"Parents should discuss with children and teachers in order to find out where the problems lie," says Chou Li-yu. To fix them, it may be necessary to find a suitable cram school. But once a student has reached the point where he can continue learning successfully, he should consider withdrawing so that he will not become dependent on cram schools.

On leaving their cram-school classes, students pause in the downstairs lobby to light a stick of incense at the shrine of Wenchang Dijun, the patron deity of scholarship. Even at this tender age, they have to grit their teeth and ask the gods for help.

The consequences of cramming

The question is, how did cram schools, which originally played a remedial role, reach a status that parallels ordinary schools today, sometimes even overtaking them in importance? What pitfalls and ill effects are involved?

"The junior-high-school habit of attending supplementary classes for each subject will be carried through high school and college," Hsu Yueh-o warns. There are serious aftereffects to cram school study: in the long term, the habit of studying key points organized by others, though relatively easy, intangibly results in a loss of training in digesting, integrating and organizing knowledge through self-study. At the same time, supplementary education is often limited to mechanical, repetitive drills: rather than spending a great deal of time striving to gain a few more points, it is better to master the basic concepts, then use one's time for exploring, thinking and application. Only then can one truly boost one's own abilities. Nowadays, with "dumbing down" of university education and poor study habits and skills among graduate students, Hsu believes the cram-school culture can hardly absolve itself of blame.

The current fashion for taking composition classes at cram school is also worth discussing. Writers and scholars agree that such composition classes are not only ineffective, but systematic models also harm students' ability to express thoughts and sentiments.

An anecdote: one year the composition subject for an exam was trees. The grader found that, in a batch of 50 test papers, 38 people had written about an old banyan tree at their grandfather's house, most compositions involving storytelling under the tree. Another year the topic was loss; that time, surprisingly, more than 30,000 test candidates wrote about grief felt when their grandmother passed away, resulting in scores on the low side.

By the very nature of education, learning is an exploratory process. Chou Li-yu brings up the theories of Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, explaining that, due to differences in the basic framework of different people's assimilation of knowledge, children learn on their own rather than being taught by others. Thus, reserving enough time in advance for student-teacher dialog and analysis is the true spirit of learning. But cram schools offer direct, accelerated learning models, greatly reducing the scope for such interaction. Moreover, with high scores as their only goal, cram schools are overly utilitarian and superficial, degrading study into a mere tool.

Does it matter how much we learn?

"With children so dependent on supplementary education, school administrators should not only blame cram schools, but also look at themselves in the mirror," says Chou, offering another perspective. Normalized education does not conflict with educational advancement, she maintains, and the key to correcting the social ill of cram school study lies in the school campuses. This is particularly so with regard to professional education, where the responsibility rests on the school and the teachers.

As for students who cannot understand what their teacher is teaching, there are many reasons behind this. Differences in student achievement within a class can be excessive, possibly due to the normal class grouping adopted by junior high schools nowadays. Within a class, a bimodal pattern is commonly found: teachers usually teach at an intermediate level, resulting in the students at the two extremes not benefiting. If schools can offset this by split-group teaching and after-school remedial education, or even give split-group exams according to level of ability, then they will be unlikely to end up with underachieving students facing the choice of either attending cram school or being forced to give up.

Again, regarding exams, daily testing has become the norm on high school campuses nowadays. First, whether or not they cause students to lose their appetite for learning, their original purpose of tests is to serve as a checkup. However, when teachers are busy giving exams all day, they are unable to help students discover their weaknesses in comprehension. Those with good native intelligence will perhaps break past the barrier by themselves, but most students will keep trying without making progress. The purpose of exams is not achieved, instead becoming just a tool for determining students' aptitude.

With teachers going through the motions of teaching while ignoring how much their students have learned, National Alliance of Parents Associations president Hsiao Hui-yin has for years advocated a new concept that teachers have obligations toward both parents and students, destroying the traditional notion that education is a conscious undertaking and one has a responsibility only toward oneself.

For instance, one chemistry teacher who heard that many students were taking supplementary science classes asked, "Is my teaching that bad?" Feeling ashamed, the teacher called back all of his students, using the time after class to go over the lecture again and give his students individual instruction.

"If educational reform can train school teachers to be this responsible and passionate, cram school would have no selling points to tout," Prudence Chou sighs.

The spread of the cram-school culture reflects a variety of psychological, social and educational problems, and the pros and cons vary according to person and motive, so there is no single solution. It would be best if the fleeting years of youth could be free of cram school, but with internal anxiety of educational reform and external pressure to attend cram school, how to determine their own needs and make the choice to swim against the tide has become an unavoidable topic for parents and students.

"Coming here is the happiest time of my otherwise-mundane high-school senior experience. Thank you for sharing your life experiences," declares a message on the cram school's bulletin board. Some address the teacher as "Dad," another calls him "a grown-up friend worthy of respect." Some people said that they had suffered through studying before, but now that they know how to study their grades are skyrocketing.

Perhaps if we can find helpful teachers and cram schools that can provide hope for our course of study, the sense of frustration with having to use supplementary education would vanish into thin air.