
An article that pushes for changes is one by Nishino and Larson. They insist that school causes stress, extended schooling causes long hours, little sleep and exhaustion, and with little spare daylight hours juku students are not allowed the exercise and free time they need to socialize and grow in areas other than academia. Japanese students are expected many times by parents to not only enter high school and university, but to attend the highest possible ranking schools. The students are given a lot of expectations and responsibility yet they are forced to endure the pressure on their own many times without encouragement and with lack of involvement on the part of the parents other than paying for schools any making certain their children are obtaining high scores. While this may not hold true of all families of juku students, overall the students could benefit from regular activities with less pressures. 
In addition to regular school and juku, there are other alternatives. Students can be involved in baskets, or after school programs that are organized for sports matches and skills, after school clubs such as debate teams or social clubs, or other school activities such as student council. Bakatsu offers a more well-rounded education as it includes socializing, similar interests with peers, and physical fitness. According to the authors, other time spent outside of academic regular and after school settings is spent 2 hours of watching television or listening to music; the researchers found that only 1 hour was spent on average with social interaction and talking outside of school; other activities were found to take place from 5-7pm or on weekends (including television watching and social interaction).
	Overall, Torrance and Gardena school have very high enrollment in public schools for Anglo Americans and Asians and Asian-Americans; much higher in fact than the Latino/a, Black, and Native American populations. The demographics of the public schools are consistent with the regions in Torrance and Gardena. Overall, Torrance schools have very high success rates for standardized exams such as the SAT as well as for acceptance out of high school into the UC system. 
	The city of Torrance has as abundance of opportunities for learning about and enrolling in prep classes for the SAT. While Torrance and Gardena, unfortunately, are not very close to many universities there is still some library and bookstore access where free resources such as Kaplan, Princeton Review, and Bobrow books can be read and used for free during open hours. The store clerks never harass students for reading the materials even if they go in each day to read and they never buy a thing! This is very great because most students do not have a lot of spare money. 
	The one thing that I think is a great disadvantage about living in Torrance is that if a student is accepted into a university the commutes can be difficult. And it is also hard for college students to find late night places to study because the communities seem to cater to high school age students. 