kumon sucks: a retrospective

once upon a time, i had a blog with a fair bit of traffic. one of my most popular posts was kumon sucks about how, exactly, kumon sucks. let me continue.

for those of you that don't know, kumon is this program imported from japan that has spread worldwide like a stage 6 pandemic. it must've come here before 10 years ago because when i was 7 or 8 it was spreading from city to city. basically, it's this academic program where one can study english, japanese, or math through these packets. these packets have multiple problems on them. the kumon center will give you a number of these packets and it's homework. the next week when you go back to kumon, you turn in the ones that you finished the prior week and get back the packets that you did before, all graded. you have to correct the mistakes you made and then turn them back in, as well as get a whole new week's worth of packets.

see nothing wrong with this? on paper, it's quite simple and straightforward. however, these corrections start to add up and it becomes grueling to correct all of the corrections. i mean, okay, fine, if you had done all the questions right in the first place, you wouldn't have to correct them. true. however, the problem lies in the amount of problems. there are so many problems in a packet. so many. 

this isn't an average school homework assignment. these kumon packets have so many problems on a homework packet that are almost exactly the same. referring to the mathematics that they have, they have pages full of the exact same math problem, only with different numbers and variables substituted. this makes the whole process completely boring, completely rote, and completely brutish. 

doing the same problem, essentially, over and over will help you learn; i completely agree. however is this really the way that students should learn? is rote memorization the premiere way to grasp a concept? or is it more learning how and why the problem works? doing those problems, one after another, the prior problem exactly like the one after it, was hell. of course there would multiple corrections to be made on the previous week's packets: the student gets so bored with doing the same problem that their mind wanders off. through the exact mechanism that kumon tries to succeed, it fails. 

kumon is incredibly devious in it's educational manipulation and business strategy. kumon is based on the premise that you cannot learn without being firmly planted in the basics. there is nothing wrong with that statement, however, kumon uses that belief to keep students in the kumon program longer, allowing it to milk more and more money out of the student. how? they put you at a level lower than you actually deserve. while i was in algebra 2 in freshman year of high school, kumon placed me at a pre-algebra level, saying that i wasn't solid in it. they're statement was further supported by my numerous mistakes on the pre-algebra homework i was assigned--homework that i didn't bother to try on because of the mind-numbing uselessness of it all. by keeping me at a lower level, they hoped that i would stay in the program longer. 

the kumon director has the only say as to what level you should be at. no matter what you say, they will say, "you aren't solid in the basics" and put you at a level that they deem sufficient. and you pay for the shit. great business strategy. parents eat this shit up, too. the reason that parents enroll their kids in kumon in the first place is because 1.) they want their kids to "excel" in school or 2.) they want their kids to catch up to the rest of their classmates. kumon seems to be the answer because all you do is sit around and do problems and more problems--time spent "studying" rather than on the computer. well parents, it's not time well spent. brute memorization is exactly that--for brutes. we're human beings. we don't have to be conditioned to learn how to do long division. we don't have to be conditioned to learn to solve for x. 

sure, you may argue that sometimes doing problems over and over is the way to learn things and that kumon is just following a traditional learning outline. that's fine. however, kumon needs to re-look at their content and see that all of their problems are essentially the exact same problem. this may get the kid a's in math. it sure as hell ain't gonna get the kid very far in conceptual mathematics or physics. again, also, kumon's business strategy is to keep the student in the program as long as they can. this needs to end. parents, and students, should have a say where they are placed. 

i went through kumon for quite a number of years. after going through almost all of the packets to complete a level, allowing me to progress to the next level of learning (i.e. algebra => geometry), the director made me retake the level again, saying that i missed questions, and because i missed a certain number of problems, i "didn't get it." this didn't happen once; it happened numerous times. again, i was bored out of my mind, being forced to do problems that were for students 3-4 grades below me. my parents didn't really care: they were all for the kumon strategy, as i'm sure most are. 

i ended up collecting the finished packets that i had finished correcting and using those as answer sheets for the redo packets that i got. i learned to re-number packets and just not do packets. i learned to manipulate the graders and manipulate the system. i learned to think that learning wasn't fun. i learned that the only point of learning is for a goal, for a grade, for an achievement. i learned that learning is always graded. i learned that learning is always compared to other's learning. i learned that learning is composed of rigid levels. 

 

eventually i reached the age of reason and quit. i feel bad for everyone who's still in. telling your parents is pretty useless. if you can't quit, i suggest befriending everyone else in the program and setting up a system where each person saves their finished corrected packets for each level and exchange it with other students in that level so that they can have the answers as well. maybe you could even make some cash off of selling the answers. 

educational manipulation answered by capitalism. capitalism. the answer to the world's problems.