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Commentary: Academic competition is causing misery to South Korean children and parents alike

The extreme pressure heaped by parents on children to perform well in exams to secure places at prestigious high school and universities is a recurrent theme in K-dramas, says the Financial Times’ Christian Davies.

Commentary: Academic competition is causing misery to South Korean children and parents alike
Past attempts to rein in hagwon - private tuition and cram schools - in South Korea have only been partially successful in the face of irrepressible parental demand. (Photo: iStock/takasuu)

SEOUL: “First! Children must play immediately. Second! Children must be healthy immediately. Third! Children must be happy immediately.”

That is the battle cry of Bang Gu-ppong, commander-in-chief of the fictional Children’s Liberation Army of Korea, who steals the show - and a bus full of kids - in an episode of Extraordinary Attorney Woo, my favourite South Korean drama.

In the episode, Bang is revolted by the pressure being piled on young children to study late into the night at the evening academies known as hagwon. He resolves to set them free.

Commandeering a school bus, he gives pupils the option of going to the academy as usual or to play on a mountain. They opt for the latter. But when he is arrested, it is Korean society that is put on trial.

OUT OF CONTROL COMPETITION

The extreme pressure heaped by parents on Korean children and teenagers to perform well in standardised academic tests - required to secure a handful of places at prestigious high schools and universities - is a recurrent theme in many television shows here.

In Extraordinary Attorney Woo, the young children that Bang wants to set free have been left physically and mentally shattered by the hagwon, where they study for hours after school while sustaining themselves on junk food and caffeinated drinks.

LISTEN: Am I a bad parent … if I don’t send my child for tuition?

In real life, everybody I speak to agrees that the competition is totally out of control, causing misery to children and parents alike.

A businessman who works at a major South Korean company describes coming home to his son crying over maths homework at least twice a week. The boy recently asked his crestfallen parents if he had been born "just to do homework", and told them he wished he had never been born at all. He is 10 years old.

PARENTAL DEMAND FOR AFTER-SCHOOL ACADEMIES

Past attempts to rein in private tutors and crammers in South Korea have only been partially successful. The hagwon were banned during the 1980s, but the prohibition could not be enforced in the face of irrepressible parental demand.

In 2008, the Seoul authorities introduced maximum operating hours for the academies - from 5am to 10pm. But five years later, there were still reports of pupils being bussed out of Seoul at 10pm so as to study at off-site locations until 2am, before returning ahead of an early school start the next day.

Ye-seul, 29, experienced the hagwon system both as a pupil and as a teacher, and then later as the co-founder of a new academy.

She says a “culture of shame” operates, as the blame for failing to meet unrealistic expectations is passed from parents to teachers to children, and back to parents.

WORSENING INEQUALITY

Suicide is going up among teenagers, even as the overall rate, already the highest in the developed world, is coming down. In one instance, Ye-seul found an 18-year-old boy, the brightest in her class, on the roof of the academy building contemplating whether or not to end his life.

Thoughtful and creative, he struggled with standardised tests. Having failed to get into one of the country’s three most prestigious universities, his mother had told him he was a “scumbag not worth the cost of the clothes he was wearing”.

The problem is also feeding wider systemic issues. The expense of private tuition is one of the principal reasons for the country’s astoundingly low birth rate: Government statistics show the amount spent on private academies in South Korea reached a new record of US$20 billion in 2022, up 10.8 per cent in a year.

Inequality has also been exacerbated, as wealthy parents secure star tutors and access to the best cram schools. The economy is suffering from a severe shortage of workers with other, vocational skills.

Ye-seul says the cruellest irony is that an obsession with standardised tests - ostensibly introduced to guard against corrupt admissions practices - means that after all that studying, the kids are “not even getting a good education”.

As many Korean parents will tell you, it’s one thing to recognise the problem; another to opt out and risk your child slipping down the ladder.

But as the commander-in-chief of the Children’s Liberation Army of Korea reminds us, some things are more important. “Children have to play right now,” he tells the court, unrepentant. “Later is too late.”

Source: Financial Times/ch
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