"A Parent's Dream Come True": Kumon Math, Maternal Labor, and Discourses of "Tradition" in the 1980s and 1990s

This paper explores the role of East Asian growth in shaping American thinking about education, gender and family roles, and capitalist competition. It does so by examining the discourse surrounding the growing popularity of Kumon in the United States in the 1980s and the early 1990s. A math-focused afterschool tutoring program first developed in Japan, by the early 1990s Kumon served more students than any other for-profit tutoring chain. Buoyed by its Japanese origins and its popularity with Asian migrant families, Kumon promised to improve children’s math skills through the daily completion of worksheets emphasizing computational math skills. Kumon’s advocates claimed that this return to “traditional” math would compensate for the failures of American public education and its infatuation with misguided reforms. As a private educational corporation, and a Japanese import, Kumon thus captured many Americans’ belief that the country needed to look to the private sector—and to East Asia—in order to prepare its children for a globalized capitalist world. In making this argument, Kumon also asserted the need for intensive maternal labor to compensate for the failures of American education. Coverage of Kumon claimed that its success required parental time, suggesting that Kumon would force parents—mothers—to take proper control of their children’s education, rather than ceding that control to bloated and failing schools. Ultimately, Kumon discourse sought to discipline both children and their mothers as an individual solution to increasingly global capitalist competition, arguing that a return to “tradition”—traditional math, traditional family roles—would lead the United States to a more prosperous future. Kumon thus serves as a site to examine how the growth of East Asian economies formed a constitutive role in the discourses and lived experience of American neoliberalism.