News eSports high school getting dropouts back in class

The academy, which mixes traditional class work with hours of intensive video game training, was founded to feed the growing global demand for professional gamers. But educators believe they have stumbled onto something more valuable: a model for getting students like Wataru back in school. "School refusal" — chronic absenteeism often linked to anxiety or bullying — has been a preoccupation in Japan since the early 1990s, when educators first noticed that more than one per cent of elementary and middle school students had effectively dropped out. The number has since more than doubled. Other countries like the United States have reported higher rates, but it is difficult to make direct comparisons because of varying definitions of absenteeism.

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On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, pros instructed students on competition strategies for popular games like Fortnite and Valorant. On one such day, students gathered around a whiteboard for a nearly scientific lecture about the relative merits of Street Fighter characters, then broke into groups to put the lesson into action. Students studied core subjects like math, biology, and English on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Unlike at regular Japanese schools, classes started later, at 10, with no uniforms.

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