Written by Muchang B. (KIS'19)
Edited by Jenny C. (VHS'19)
━━ March 31, 2018 ━━
Korea: Is It Really the Best in Education?
The pressure to succeed through tremendous academic workloads to later pluck a spot from top universities is prevalent in both students and parents worldwide. In former U.S. President Richard Nixon's Address to the Nation on Labor Day, he expresses the importance of motivation in boosting work productivity in America. Nixon’s argument, which is applicable in other countries, also imply that the lack of intrinsic motivational qualities in East Asian education poses a major threat towards future workforces. One such country, South Korea, specifically, stands as a top model for education, with its students ranking among the best in international exams due to academic discipline and rigor, but this title comes with heavy sacrifices. Because of higher standards on teenagers to be overachievers, a life filled with cram schools (known as hagwons in Korea), assertive parents, and sleepless nights becomes the main sources of stress on students.
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The Impact of Crammed Schedules
One such student, Hye-Min Park, a high school student living in Gangnam, Korea, wakes up at 6:30 AM and attends school until 4:00 PM. She returns home for a brief dinner with her family, followed by another set of drudging supplemental lessons at her hagwon from 6~9:00 PM. Hye-Min then heads over to school again for 2 more hours of self-studying and returns home after 11:00 PM, only to continue working on homework until she sleeps at 2:00 AM. This rigorous schedule of attending a double shift of schools for teenagers is not uncommon in Korea, as, according to Ken Robinson, a British author, speaker, and international advisor on education, the majority of South Korean parents spend tens of thousands of dollars per year on just out-of-school education (tutors and hagwons), totaling up to a whopping $18 billion, 8% of Korea’s GDP.
Most Koreans believe that rigorous studying is the only path to success, leading to an overwhelming competition in terms of academics sustained by the $20 billion hagwon industry. As a result, Korean schools produce armies of formidable test takers outperforming other countries in academics, with the common idea that “success is most important, no matter what the cost” engraved into their minds according to Mr. Se-Woong Koo, a former hagwon teacher and a lecturer in Korean studies in Yale University. While Korean students may be top exam scorers, their methods in obtaining these results have drawbacks because they are working up to 13 hours a day and sleeping 5.5 hours nightly on average, potentially leading to health-related and mental consequences, all on top of the lack of motivation. This ongoing struggle between performance and educational flexibility for Korean teenagers prompts the question: Should the Korean educational system be changed to give high school students more freedom in non-academic activities?
South Korea's dramatic economic advancement reform in the 1960s reshaped the needs of the human workforce, demanding a highly educated labor force to support the relatively higher growth in white-collar jobs and leading to a sharp increase in college enrollment rates. The Presidential Commission on Education Reform, launched in 1985 by South Korean President Kim Young-Sam improved the quality, organization, and globalization of the education system, but it also created a great demand for teachers, school facilities, and education equipment. Therefore, the rivalry among students in qualifying for top universities exploded because the university one graduates from plays a huge role in determining his/her future jobs and marriage prospects.
To accommodate for the heightened competitiveness, the desire to seek further education for personal advantages led to the hagwon industry burgeoning. Additionally, the standardized CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test) was another main source of concern due to its tremendous weight in university admissions alongside grades, with extracurriculars being disregarded. The fact that the CSAT was meant to be taken only once (during senior year) also promoted the one-shot system that Korea had towards university entrances, where one either “makes it or breaks it.”
Thus, hagwons have been thriving in Korea, fueled by the relentless pressure in needing to score well on the CSAT to secure a position in Korea’s top universities, known as the SKY (Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei) Universities. There is a saying in Korea that “If you sleep 4 hours every night, you may get into a SKY University, [and] if you sleep 4~5 hours, you may get into some other university. If you sleep more than 5 hours every night, forget about getting into any university” (Wood). The values represented by this iconic statement, along with the assertive nature of authoritarian parents and teachers, factor into students’ loss in sleep, happiness, and motivation.
Overall, this investment in education results in South Korea’s outstanding scores in international exams, but this system driven by overzealous parents and days filled with arduous lectures is unsustainable on the long run. Countless parents, such as Hye-Min’s mother, are well-aware of this problem, but they state that “in Korea, where there are so many people and so little resources, anyone who wants to be successful really has to stand out.”
Reduction in sleep, the most prevalent problem facing Korean teenagers, not only limits metabolic functions, but also reduces learning, attention, and memory processing. According to Dr. Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the brain, when tired, will not be able to absorb information as well because the lack of sleep directly fatigues the brain’s neurons, leading to a loss in the ability to process learned information. Additionally, studies show that immune response may also be impaired, increasing the likelihood of contracting infections, viruses, and diseases. Dr. Harvey R. Colten, a pediatric immunologist and a leading medical educator at Columbia University, claims that sleep loss can even influence a student’s behaviour, resulting in higher levels of depressed mood, anxiety, and attempted suicide.
Furthermore, epidemiological research suggests that working continuously for long hours harms one’s health, correlating with increased incidences of coronary heart diseases, strokes, and possibly cancer. An observational, large-scale study with 116,462 participants published by the British Journal of Cancer (BJC), a professional medical journal of Cancer Research UK, showed that those working less than 35 hours/week had a slightly reduced risk of cancer, while those working 55 hours or longer per week was associated with an significantly increased risk of specifically breast cancer. According to these statistics, a Korean student’s working hours of 13 hours/day * 7 days = 91 hours/week puts them well into the risk zone of cancer and other possible conditions.
Shifting towards psychological influences, Korea unfortunately holds another record of one of the highest suicide rates of industrialized OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, with 29.1 persons committing suicide per 100,000 in 2015 and 28.9 persons in 2016. Among young South Koreans who confessed to feeling suicidal in 2010, 53% identified inadequate academic performance as the reason, implying that countless students view their academic performance as their only source of validation and self-worth. The Youth Happiness Index, an international organization specializing in gathering youth-connected data, also stated in 2014 that, mostly because of study pressure, only 67.6% of Korean teenagers were satisfied with their lives compared to the OECD average of 85.5%. Hye-Min even states that her motivation to overcome the urge to sleep to study harder comes from her satisfactory test scores. Her extrinsic motivation founded by her letter grades for pushing herself and losing sleep takes away the essence of education since intrinsic motivation, the factor that Richard Nixon claims to be so important in productivity, disappears in Korean schools.
This system forces students through a narrow, inflexible path that annihilates the creativity and individuality of each teenager to pursue their unique desires (in which many may not be oriented towards academics). Mr. Sun-Joon Hwang, an education researcher at Gyeonggi Institute of Education, believes that the “problem with the Korean educational methods of cramming is that it misses critical thinking, which restricts students from coming up with original and creative ideas.” Rob Ouwehand, a Canadian lecturer with 10 years of working experience in Korea, also agrees that this method will not prepare students beyond the school environment due to the lack of freedom students have on being successful. In fact, the CSAT, the ultimate symbol of Korea’s one-shot society, is the main factor limiting the freedom on Korean students due to its importance, making it inevitable that Koreans would train endlessly in hagwons to score well on it.
Even though the academic rigor in Korea may be a burden to students, the quality of valuing hard work, diligence, and discipline is beneficial in making progress towards whatever goals one may have. In fact, Nicki Gerstner, an overseas teacher participating in the Global Studies in Education program at the University of Illinois, views the Korean system as an extra benefit to students since it teaches them to be so much more disciplined. The former U.S. President Barack Obama even cited the Korean system as the panacea to improve American education, stating that American students, who “spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea, ... [will in] no way prepare them for a 21st century economy.” In conjunction, Amanda Ripley, a journalist and the author of The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, also believes that Korean education will be more beneficial to children, as it disregards natural talents and instead values hard work above all.
Nevertheless, former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has focused the administration’s policy in creating a system centered around “creativity, diversity, and self-determination.” He has worked to reduce the amount of required study materials so students are able to lead more-varied academic lives, and the administration has created an increasing range of “Meister schools” that train students in specific fields and allow them to gain employment immediately upon high school graduation (and enter into universities later), therefore alleviating the pressure from studying for CSATs. However, discrimination against Meister school graduates is still common as they are seen as the underdogs of society, resulting in them being rejected from working in well-paying positions in companies such as Hyundai or Samsung. Furthermore, this change, which allows students to determine the rigor of their own education, could significantly decrease the valued competitive nature and the work ethics unique to Koreans, leading to a decline in educational progression.
The government has also committed to strengthening public education by having a testing system that examines general student achievements and teacher competency in each school. For schools that ranked low in these assessments, the administration has added appointed “honor teachers," expanded mentoring programs for students and funded the purchase of new educational equipment, therefore giving more resources to improve student education. However, the implementation of these policies would be disastrous for the 100,000 hagwons in South Korea, leading to unemployment rate spikes. Contrastingly, gathering all schools towards equal standards and having students improve at the same pace could, in fact, promote the usage of hagwons due to the desire to overachieve beyond peers.
Prioritizing the well-being of Korean students and their educational development, the ideal method would be to adjust the Korean one-shot system to resemble the American system of being able to retake the exams, which would not only put less pressure on students but would also free up time to foster creativity and independence, therefore promoting enthusiasm in pursuing particular interests for future majors or careers. Students will also be able to experience what the actual test is like, and the idea of having a retake alleviates the pressure in having everything being dependent on a single chance. Allowing more than one retake date, however, could be detrimental since having too many opportunities to score well on CSATs can lead to procrastination for studying. So introducing one other date to take the CSATs for a total of two testing periods–one in the beginning and one in the end of senior year–and counting the student’s latest taken CSAT test score as the application score will positively impact on student lives without actually changing the testing process itself.
Moreover, all core classes can still be maintained in high schools, and the option to retake the test will allow students to still pursue their goals of getting into SKY Universities while they can concentrate on their own interests. Additionally, the high standards, rigor, competition, and hardworking nature of the Korean educational system is not compromised, and the hagwons’ range of subjects can also expand beyond the strictly academic classes needed for standardized tests. “Intensive education may have been right while Korea was growing its economy,” says Professor JuHo Lee, a former education minister and an academic at the Korea Development Institute, “but now is a time for a new strategy.” Therefore, a neo-educational system that doesn’t solely focus on memorizing quadratic formulas or cramming vocabulary words, but instead, one that embraces creativity, interactiveness, and most importantly, motivation, will clearly be better suited to the modern world beyond the classroom.
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