CreateBase — Industry Critique
The cause runs deeper than individual households. A frank account, from inside the industry, of how Japan's major cram school system structurally produces this harm — and what we have learned by removing parental interference.
Japan's junior high entrance exam (中学受験) is a uniquely intense private-school selection process for children typically aged 10 to 12. Roughly one in five children in Tokyo and one in ten in Osaka now sit it. The industry is dominated by large chain cram schools (juku) operating on a class-streaming model based on weekly test results. This piece is written by the founder of a small Osaka-based school that has refused to enroll children whose parents will not agree to step back from interfering with their study. Inquiries from journalists are welcome.
"Junior high entrance exams are abuse." Voices have been making this claim for years. We did not take it seriously at first — most of it sounded like adults attributing their own life dissatisfactions to their educational background. That has changed. What we are seeing in the children themselves, in the way they study, and in how their parents treat them, has reached a point where it cannot be dismissed. Educators across the field are reporting the same pattern. This is no longer an individual issue. It is a structural problem produced by the major cram school system, and it deserves to be addressed as one.
For years we treated the louder claims about the entrance exam system with skepticism. Over the past several years, our position has shifted. Watching what is happening to children's faces, to their motivation, and to the quality of their parents' involvement, the number of cases that cannot be dismissed has plainly grown. Other educators in daily contact with these children are reporting the same thing.
The following are observations from inside our own classrooms. Multiple educators have reported the same pattern; we treat this as a trend, not an isolated case.
These are not signs of "being weak at study." They are signs that initiative and the capacity for independent thought have themselves been damaged.
Map a single day in the life of a Japanese child preparing for the entrance exam:
| Child preparing for the exam | What it would look like for an adult |
|---|---|
| Early morning: arithmetic drills (in some households) | Early morning: work from home |
| Morning: school | Morning: primary job |
| After school: cram school | Afternoon: second job |
| Evening: school and cram school homework | Evening: take-home overtime |
| Weekends: mock exams, supplementary classes | Weekends: working |
| Vacations: none — 365 days a year | Vacations: none — 365 days a year |
For an adult, a schedule of this kind would be a labor law violation. For a child, it is imposed under the heading of "education." Children cannot articulate their fatigue or change their environment on their own. This is precisely why outside judgment and intervention matter.
One of the most common complaints we hear from children is the same: "I'm being scolded for not being able to do problems I can't do." A parent reads from the answer key, demands "why can't you do this?" — and then, when asked to demonstrate the problem themselves, cannot. This pattern is treated as "instruction" inside many homes, and it is not.
The most serious version is when parents hand children a problem with no hint and no explanation, refuse to release them until it is finished, and sometimes resort to physical force. Imposing problems on a child without competent support does not deepen understanding. The act of pretending to teach problems one cannot solve oneself is, on its own, a form of abuse.
"The child says they want to keep going" / "They never said they wanted to quit"
These phrases are used routinely by parents to justify excessive study. What they actually do is shift the responsibility for the decision onto the child. The question worth asking is who created the environment in which the child cannot say "I want to stop." That is not the child's responsibility.
We had a student once who could not even tell us their own school's schedule. We asked the parents directly: "Please leave everything to your child — school, study, all of it. Do not say a word about any of it." We were prepared for resistance.
That child began managing their own schedule and started studying voluntarily. This was not an isolated case. We have tried the same approach with multiple households and observed the same change in the children's relationship to learning, repeatedly.
Out of these experiences we have arrived at a conclusion: before changing anything about the study itself, the simplest and most effective intervention is to remove the parents' excessive interference. Our current policy is to decline enrollment, or in serious cases ask families to leave, when parental interference is severe.
There are also households with whom genuine, constructive partnership is possible. In our experience, this is less than one percent of the total. The children of those families tend to show outstanding qualities not only academically, but across the board.
It is true that the parents are the immediate perpetrators. But stopping the analysis at "the family is to blame" misses the structure of the problem entirely.
Consider an analogy. If a child shoplifts, the legal and moral responsibility belongs to the parent who set them to it, not the child who committed the act. In the same way, when a parent is grinding their child down, and the parent themselves is being ground down by something else, the second source is what needs to be examined.
Most parents engaged in educational abuse are not deliberately trying to harm their children. They have been pushed, step by step, into a state they cannot see clearly from inside.
The desire to "get my child into a higher class" is common across families, whether the underlying motive is the child's interest or the parent's status. The structural problem is what happens when this desire collides with the major cram school's competition system: parents are pulled toward "raise the test score by any means available."
The major cram school system creates the conditions under which educational abuse can flourish. Parents are the executors of the abuse. That is the accurate description of how this works.
This is, in fact, the reason CreateBase exists. Inside the fixed-curriculum, low-meaning lectures, the volumes of homework no child can finish, the relentless cycle of testing — the conditions a child needs to actually understand were nowhere to be found.
The parents now putting children through the entrance exam system are themselves products of the same major cram school structure, one generation earlier. The chain that has produced is roughly the following:
It is not an outlandish hypothesis to suggest that a system that has not changed for decades, and which actively suppresses the capacity for independent thought and action, has played a meaningful role in the broader stagnation of the Japanese economy — what is often called Japan's "lost three decades." The cumulative long-term effect of an educational chain that erodes the muscle of independent thinking deserves serious attention. Now, while this is finally being discussed as a social problem, is the time to ask the question seriously.
The structure, not only the family, is the cause
The immediate executors are the parents. But behind them stands a structural cause: the competition system of Japan's major cram schools. Condemning parents alone will not resolve the problem. The system itself has to be re-examined, and the environment in which children can actually develop has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
From this position we have built our own approach: removing parental interference, fully bespoke practice-based instruction, no homework, and a hybrid group-individual format. Several students have used this approach to gain admission to Japan's most selective junior high schools.
Educational abuse is no longer a private matter for individual households — it is a problem the wider society has to confront. Anyone working on this question, whether inside the education sector or outside it, is welcome to get in touch. We are open to exchange and to thinking through concrete responses together.
What does educational abuse actually look like?
It is the imposition of study beyond a child's will and beyond what the child can absorb, accompanied by ongoing psychological and sometimes physical harm — including verbal abuse, physical force, and forced study over excessive hours. Visible signs in the child include loss of facial expression and a marked drop in motivation. The line between "passionate involvement" and "abuse" can be drawn at two questions: is the child in a position where they can decline, and is the involvement focused only on the result without the support to get there?
Why are junior high entrance exams especially likely to produce educational abuse?
The class-promotion system used by Japan's major cram schools is the central structural cause. The parental desire to "get my child into a better class" combines with a competition system built on enormous homework volumes, frequent testing, and repetition drills. When results don't come, the anxiety often escalates into abuse. The fact that the parents themselves were raised inside the same system is what makes this problem persistent across generations.
What should I do if I'm seeing signs of educational abuse in a child?
Removing the parental involvement temporarily, and handing the child responsibility for their own schedule and study direction, is often effective. We have several cases where simply doing this restored a voluntary engagement with study. If improvement does not appear, or if the situation is severe, in addition to schools and cram schools, we recommend reaching out to specialized counseling services.
How is your school's approach different from a standard cram school or individual tutoring?
Major cram schools center on a fixed curriculum, group lectures, and a class-competition system that depends on enormous homework loads. We use neither pure group instruction nor pure individual tutoring; our format is a hybrid in which students of different grades and abilities work in the same room on individually tailored practice problems. Lectures are kept to the minimum (around ten minutes), and there is no homework — practice is concentrated inside the school, raising the quality of understanding and producing reproducible ability.
Trial sessions and pre-enrollment consultations are available year-round.