[translations idioma=”ES” url=”http://rgnn.org/2014/04/02/serie-educacion-la-educacion-en-corea-del-sur-el-fracaso-del-exito/”]
Under the motto, “Education is the key,” ROOSTERGNN is publishing a Special Series dedicated exclusively to one of the most important topics defining our society of today: Education. View the complete series here.

SOUTH KOREA. Although it might surprise many readers, South Korea has become one of the countries with the highest educational success rates in the world, surpassing many consolidated countries like those of Northern Europe, including Finland, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. With a population similar to Spain’s, a much smaller surface area (99.313 km2), and an unstable political environment due to the military confrontation with the Stalinist North Korea, South Korea as of 2013 is an example of extraordinary economic growth. It is ranked number three in a list of Asia’s most powerful economies, and number twelve in the world ranking. Now, after long decades of military dictatorships, South Korea is experiencing a consolidation of its democratic system, setting unprecedented stakes on university and non-university education.

South Korea has risen to one of the highest positions on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report for reading, surpassing countries such as Finland, Canada, and Australia. In mathematics, South Korea maintains a level equivalent to those of Holland, Finland, and Taiwan. The most recent data published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) rates South Korea’s education system as sixth in the world. In 2011, the country replaced Finland for first place, and since then, its progress has been unstoppable.

The educational policy in South Korea has come a long way over the last 60 years, starting from a position of absolute illiteracy in 1945, after the cruel Japanese military occupation. However, the lack of natural resources forced the different governments, including the military dictatorships that devastated the country until the end of the 1980s, to compensate for this with the focus on education that allowed for development based on industry, technology, and research. A fact worth noting: in the middle of the 1970s, the average wealth of South Korea was comparable to the wealth of Afghanistan, and its economic position was lower than North Korea’s. Today, South Korea has the 12th most successful economy in the world, with only 47 million residents and with hardly any important natural resources to sustain an industrial economy, unlike countries like Norway, China, the United States, Germany, or France, which are all rich in natural resources. If in 1945 South Korea was a humble population with chronic illiteracy under foreign oppression, at the beginning of the 1990s, one in every three South Koreans that began secondary education continued on to enroll at a university.

The Korean philosophy of life has greatly influenced these new developments. A 1998 OECD report already indicated that one of the keys to South Korea’s success was the strong desire to educate its citizens, a fact unparalleled in other countries. The government has achieved its goal to promote education as a way to achieve economic development, also drawing on nationalist and patriotic sentiments, and from there made palpable the motto “If you’re first in class, you’ll be first in life.” Education is seen as a means of individual and national progress, with a highly competitive environment to access the best universities. The cornerstone of the system is strengthening the study of science, mathematics, Korean, and English.

As a result, 7% of South Korea’s GDP is dedicated to education and the most recent data confirmed that 98% of students complete secondary education and that 60% earn a college degree. Furthermore, the country sends the most students abroad to continue their education, students that moreover score highest on entrance exams to some of the most prestigious universities in the United States.

The system is equally based on an added factor that reflects the Finnish model: the South Korean teachers, especially those at non-university level, are highly respected and are among some of the highest paid professionals in the country, hired among the best in their respective fields. They are subject to annual evaluations carried out by their own students and their students’ parents. Teacher support is also complemented with an excellent technological system. It is quite common for classes to be taught over the Internet. In fact, classes can even be followed on public television if a student falls sick and cannot attend school. Other cultural factors also play a role, such as the respect, or even reverence, for one’s father and teacher. There is a Korean proverb that says, “You should not step even on the shadow of the master.” This means that you are a bad child or bad student if you do not live up to the expectations that your parents, family, or professor bestow upon you.

However, the system suffers one big flaw, hence the title “the failure of success.”

The South Korean educational system requires a long school day, usually between six and seven hours of school in the public system. After regular classes, almost all of the students attend daily private lessons, called hagwons, which could last another four or five hours. According to the OECD reports, this means that South Korean students could spend about 16 hours in the classroom, a weekly average more than most other countries in the OECD. It is also common that once arriving at home, the parents pressure their children to dedicate more time to study at home. Therefore it is no uncommon for the students to go to bed at 11 pm and continue studying while in bed.

There is a strong competitiveness among the students, and this in turn leads to a strong competitiveness among families. The students are expected to be the best in everything, living under the principle of “If you’re not the best, you’re not good at anything.” It’s a principle that is supported by the previously mentioned saying, “If you’re first in class, you’ll be first in life,” which can lead to negative results. Acceptance to one of the 250 mostly private universities, therefore, is what students and parents strive for.

In addition, students are subject to strict discipline. Being late and not turning in work on time can lead to serious punishments, sometimes physical. In some cases, the whole class pays for the offense of one student. Infanciahoy.com reported in 2011 that the school uniform must be immaculate; the girls are not permitted to wear make-up and the boys are not permitted to have long hair. Furthermore, socializing among students is considered a waste of time. A relevant fact: four out of five schools monitor the interactions between students. In one instance, a religious group rewarded “virginity” with diplomas. This creates complex personal relationships during the most important stage of personality development among young people. A situation reflected by the statistic that these students send the most text messages via mobile phones: 2000 texts per student per month.

Within this panorama, the level of stress and suicides among young South Koreans is very high. The OECD affirms that young South Koreans have the highest level of stress out of those countries analyzed and that they are the least happy. While the average number of hours spent studying a week among the member countries of the OECE is 34, in South Korea it is about 50. According to the “happiness index”, South Korea has 65 points, in comparison to average score of 100 among OECD countries. 74.3% of students surveyed in 2012 said that they were very stressed due to their academic obligations. Of those surveyed, 64.7% were high school students and 31.5% were elementary students.

The South Korean Ministry of Education possesses surveys of groups of children in which only 50% of the boys claim to be happy, and one in every six say that they feel alone in life. Furthermore, almost 9% of young people confessed in 2010 to have thought about suicide at some point and almost 60% of all students said that the cause of the stress is due to “excessive competitiveness,” an issue that far from diminishing, is, in fact, increasing. Near the end of 2012, a survey revealed that one in four South Korean students had thought about suicide due to their stressful academic life. This information comes from a poll conducted on December 24, 2012, by the National Institute of Youth Policy of South Korea. In this survey, conducted among 9000 students from 300 elementary, middle, and high schools from 16 different cities, over 23% of students had considered suicide in the last 12 months and 14.4% claimed to have tried. The thought of suicide is particularly high among women; 30% compared to 17% among men. The highest percentage is among high school students, which had an average of 30%. “The female students have lower levels of self-esteem and optimism, as well as higher levels of depression and anxiety than their male classmates,” the report says.

According to the report by the institution that conducted the study, “The students’ mental health seems to deteriorate as they move to higher grades.”

Another paradox worth contemplating: the happiness index indicates that South Korean students are among the least happy in the world, in contrast to the Spanish, who lead the “podium of happiness.”

Therefore, the topic of suicide has raised great concerns. A large number of suicides among elementary and high school students have been recorded. There were 200 suicides in 2009, 47% more than in 2008. Subsequent psychological analyses of the situation report that the main reason for the suicides stems from not having achieved a high enough grade in the school examinations. As a result of having one of the highest suicide rates in the world among young people under the age of 24, the government has passed a new law on suicide prevention and has established a national network of prevention. The teachers, although highly valued, claim to feel underappreciated in their daily routine, probably due to the large amount of classes and students exhausted and overwhelmed by their extra classes at hagwon. Teachers also report that the system encourages excessive memorization, a lack of emphasis on creativity, and an authoritarian teaching style.

On the other hand, we should also factor in the cost of education. Elementary education is only free the first few years, forcing families to make a very important investment in their child’s education, which in turn leads to more pressure on the student. Data from 2010 indicated the relative private spending per student was almost 400 euros per month, which is between about 15 and 20% of a family’s income. Roughly 90% of families participate in this kind of spending. The teachers criticize this system. Un-Ju Han, a high school teacher, said, “As a teacher, it hurts me to know that parents and students rely more on private tutoring than public education. The reason is that South Korean education has become a ‘meritocracy’ ever since the fall of the caste system. There is only one way to climb the social ladder: attend a prestigious university. Therefore, so many parents force their children to achieve this goal at any cost. The competition is increasingly more ruthless“.

At the university level, these habits continue. In South Korea, 80% of young people go to college (there are about 250 universities) but the key is admission to the most prestigious institutions. There is a general entrance exam to pursue higher education that is becoming more common for universities. More than 70% of universities are private, and those require students to pass their own personal exam. These exams are known among students as Sihom chiok -“examination hell”- and can largely determine the professional and even social future of the students.

The goal is to secure a place in one of the three most prestigious universities in the country, known by the acronym SKY: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University. A degree from any one of these could lead to, with almost certainty, a thriving professional career. The competition continues after one becomes a university student. The South Korean grading scale has a maximum score of 4.2. At almost every elite university, the president has imposed that for every hundredth of point taken off below three points, the students must pay an increase in their tuition. For those who maintain a grade of three or above, the university pays for almost all of their tuition, and those students can go to school practically for free (Advanced Institute for Science and Technology- Kaist, in Daejeon).

Finally, another important fact is that South Korea sends many students to American universities and they usually achieve some of the highest grades on the entrance exams. However, after they become students at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, MIT, or any other elite university, that is when the collapse begins. Living in the harsh conditions of South Korea, individual freedom in the United States produces intense culture shock, which leads to excessive personal relaxation. They have learned to be obedient and memorize many details, but South Korean students in the U.S. suffer from a lack of creativity and an inability to work in groups. They become isolated and nonsocial, and almost half of these students (44%) fail and do not complete their education.

Finland has always had one of the most successful models of education in Europe and throughout the world. One of the main differences is that the classes are short and there is hardly any out-of-class work. The Finnish and South Korean models only have one thing in common: the quality and reputation of the teachers. However, the models are based on very distinct ideologies, as can be seen in the case of the South Korean students.

However, all of this has a specific foundation, and that is the political history of South Korea. Only from the Korean perspective can one draw the most appropriate conclusions about this educational model and other countries looking for an educational system must consider the Korean perspective. Today’s parents pressure their children to have access to the highest levels of education because they themselves were victims of economic and educational repression, and their grandparents experienced the savage occupation of the Japanese that reduced North and South Korea to colonized slavery. The economic miracle in South Korea has meant that in the psychology of its citizens, it is assumed that the personal and collective prosperity must be achieved at any cost, and education is the first step in achieving it. Education is not just a national goal, but an individual and family one as well.

South Korea, therefore, has one of the best education systems in the world, something that its citizens are very proud of. This makes South Korea a true superpower, but on the other hand, no one seems to be satisfied, and there is a profound worry among South Koreans. Experts say that South Korea is the victim of a paradox, in which great educational success is aligned with widespread dissatisfaction. It is for the reader to judge whether the South Korean model, with all its positives and negatives, should be a model used in other countries.