School starts at 8.25am and finishes at 3.30pm, with perhaps another hour for an extracurricular club. So far, so normal — except the day is just beginning. With luck, there is time to dash home for a snack, before another round of lessons at cram school from 5pm to 8pm. You commute home from that, eat, do your school homework then collapse into bed before getting up and doing it all again the next day. It is a standard schedule for many 10-year-olds in Tokyo.
For a parent, the cram school might cost $500 a month. If the teachers do their job well, your offspring will pass an exam at age 12 and enter a prestigious private junior high school, which will deliver them to a prestigious high school, then, perhaps after some more evenings at cram school, to a prestigious university, setting your child up for a life of comfort and success. The total cost in dollars could easily run to six figures: some studies suggest that Japanese and South Korean families spend more than 10 per cent of household income per child on private education.
As well as causing inequality and other social woes, demographers link the extraordinary cost of east Asia’s education arms race to its extraordinarily low fertility rates, which stand at 1.36 children per woman in Japan, 1.3 in China and 0.84 in South Korea. China’s recent decision to crack down on private tutoring — it has banned companies that teach the school curriculum from making profits, prompting shares in listed education companies to tumble — therefore makes a certain kind of sense.