Drawing on his personal experiences, ethnographic training and a firm command of the secondary literature, McVeigh exposes the sham of Japan's "quality education" with great sympathy for the students who are the hapless victims of a system that stifles learning and intellectual curiosity. He laments that, "There is a dark spirit plaguing the Japanese university classroom. It is the ghost of opinions suppressed, voices lost, self-expressions discouraged, and individuality restrained. The ghost is malevolent, and in its vengeance demands silence, self-censorship, and indifference from the students it haunts."
In his view, "Japan's higher education has been sacrificed on the altar of rapid modernization, slain by the gods of statism and corparatist forces."
Overall the Japanese educational system performs no better or worse than educational systems in other Group of Seven nations in producing "workers demanded by modernity's capitalistic socioeconomic systems." However, this comes at a cost to learning, creativity, critical thinking and curiosity. The system may succeed in training diligent workers and well-behaved citizens, but "many students are not well trained in writing critically, arguing coherently, or expressing their views with conviction or verve. In short, they have trouble with specific forms of knowledge manipulation and production that some people, with different schooling experiences, might take for granted."