Studying Too Much Is a New No-No in Upwardly Mobile South Korea
On a recent afternoon, Jung Doo-gil walked into an after-school academy with a hidden camera in her purse in search of a peculiar type of wrongdoing: overeducation. State and city governments in South Korea pay as much as $1000 to people who help catch after-school academies and cram schools that violate curfews. Moon Seong-ok teaches people how to blow the whistle. She has joined a nationwide cat-and-mouse game among parents zealous for more education for their children and government and activists who are trying to reduce the fever. Caught in the middle are the managers and teachers working in after-school academies called hagwons. Privately run education firms became a huge industry over the past decade as parents looked for ways to give their children an edge in a society in which success is defined narrowly, usually with entrance to one of a handful of colleges and then a career in government or big business. The government counts 95,000 hagwons and 84,000 individuals providing tutoring services, though others offer such services beyond the eyes of tax monitors. Parents routinely spend $1,000 a month per child at hagwons and, just as routinely, students stay in such academies well into the night.
Koreans are very proud of faring well on standardized tests, and government policy since the 1960s has been to promote education as a means of lifting the country to affluence. But there’s a long-running conflict in Korean culture, which promotes itself as classless yet clings fiercely to a hierarchical tradition. People see education as the only way to break through the hierarchy and move up the ranks of status. So actions that unfairly separate moneyed people from the pack are strongly criticized. The rising use of hagwons sparked a backlash from government officials and activist groups that say children of parents who can’t afford the private services are being left behind. Some argue that the cost of education associated with hagwons is one of the reasons South Korea’s birth rate has fallen to the lowest of any industrialized country—1.1 children per woman aged 15-49. “Students are supposed to sleep and take care of themselves instead of spending so many hours studying after school,” said Kim Seung-hyun, a former schoolteacher who now directs policy at an activist group here called World Without Private Education.
Starting in 2008, the national government allowed local regulators to impose curfews, fees and other restrictions on hagwons. And that’s when the cat-and-mouse game began. Daehak Academy, one of Seoul’s largest hagwons, started offering classes on Saturdays to make up for having to cancel classes after 10 p.m. when a curfew took effect two years ago. Lee Keun-young, management director at the academy, says no parents want their children to fail at their studies. “Some parents ask us to extend classes at night, but we should follow the [curfew] rule.” A lot is at stake. There are about six or seven colleges that everyone wants to get in to. And because of lifetime employment policies that make it very hard to fire people, the top employers, such as the government and conglomerates, recruit chiefly from those top schools. Hagwon managers or teachers who discuss ways around the rules risk running afoul of government authorities and the self-appointed whistleblowers, who have become known as hagparazzi, for their use of hidden cameras and recording devices. Acting as interested parents or potential customers, they visit an after-school academy and look for tactics that break rules. Then, they report the violators and collect a percentage of any fine that is levied. Rewards can exceed $1,000.