The Brutality of Hagwons, Part I: Decimating Korea's Birth Rate
President Yoon blamed feminists. Let's look at schools.
A demographic crisis. The rise of incels in politics. A gender divide causing social strife. Extreme inflation causing people to feel depressed and disillusioned. These are major problems in Korean society, but they are reflected—to lesser or greater degrees—in America, too. Americans, especially the elites, are beginning the Ivy League rat race at age 3. Costs of exclusive kindergartens are making even six-figure earners in NYC act the victim.
I present, part one: how Korea’s hagwon culture raises the price of education and contributes to Korea’s declining birth rate:
Korea's birthrate, which is less than half of the replacement rate, hit a record low in 2022. Yet despite the lack of children, Korean private education institutions and English-language kindergartens are thriving. These trends are more closely related than they might seem.
There are many factors contributing to these problems. They cannot all be blamed on one thing. The declining birthrate, in particular, is intractable in a country where women face egregious levels of discrimination in the workplace. A declining birthrate is also a typical social trend associated with development that is impacting many countries.
However, there are reasons why these problems of modernity are hitting Korea harder than most countries. One of them is the extremely high cost of raising a child, which is driven primarily by education. In 2022, Korea's education costs hit a new record high, and Korea was found to be the most expensive country in the world to raise a child.
The 0.78 children per woman who are born into this world will be thrust into a high-pressure education system where long hours, weekend tutoring, and harsh judgments from peers, teachers, and parents are too often the norm. If their parents can afford it, they might begin attending an all-day school at age three where teachers admonish "English only."
They will keep attending school almost continuously--with only a weeks-long vacation during the summer (one week for private schools)--until they take the college entrance exam, where it's SNU-or-bust. Then they will graduate into a job market saturated with too many overeducated elites for too few job openings at Samsung.
Educational Pressure Begins Young
From an extremely young age, Korean children are socialized into an extremely competitive, highly regimented education system that ranks and judges them by their grades and their adherence to social norms. Affluent parents send their children to expensive private English-language kindergartens that hang Ivy League flags on their walls on the (often misguided) assumption that they will have a leg up on public school students, who do not start learning English until grade three. The average monthly tuition for a private English-language kindergarten is well over 1.1 million won ($1,040). That’s more expensive than Korean university tuition.
However, the quality of education and the effectiveness of English-language kindergartens is very much in doubt. Seoul National University neuroscience professor Seo Yoo-heon said that the widespread practice of education focusing on rote memorization at a young age harms a child's creative development and may lead to neuropsychiatric diseases. The emotional and moral development of a child is ignored while "early childhood education is degrading into college entrance preparation" on the false belief that "the earlier and the more" a child studies, "the better."
I saw it first-hand teaching at an English-language kindergarten in South Korea. The curriculum emphasized students memorizing and repeating sentences from storybooks and completing a fixed number of textbooks every year. Even students lacking foundational knowledge about the alphabet were pushed to copy texts they couldn't understand in order to complete quotas. They were made to be tested monthly and yearly.
Private schools focus on satisfying their immediate customers--the parents--by creating tangible products to send home, such as completed textbooks and photos and videos of activities. At the same time, they neglect the teaching of skills and abilities that may take longer to manifest themselves in concrete output but would last with the students for a lifetime. “Children also might easily miss out on the basics if they start to learn everything in English before having a good command of their mother tongue,” said Yeom Ji-sook, a Konkuk University education professor who was quoted by the Korea Herald.
Warnings about the harmful effects of high-pressure private education institutions have been made for over a decade. In 2011, Kim Seung-hyun, director of World Without Worries about Shadow Education, said, "We think much of private education is useless and sometimes even harmful to children." Unfortunately, the warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears.
Education As A Status Good
Private education is a status good. Parents fear their child missing out. They also fear a loss of social prestige if their children are not attending the right schools. “The level of competition is very fierce, and they will spend a lot of money to ensure their child gets taught English," said Kim Hee-won, a private English teacher quoted by Al Jazeera.
The growth of English-language kindergartens has been so precipitous in wealthy neighborhoods that they will soon outnumber public and Korean-language kindergartens in Seoul's posh Gangnam, Seocho, Songapa, and Gangdong districts.
The problem is only beginning in kindergarten, of course. By elementary school, 83% of Korean students receive private tutoring, more than in China, Japan, India, and any other country cited in Yvonne Wei's and Wenyu Guan's 2021 paper.
Some of those elementary, middle, and high school students attend after-school cram schools that stay open until 10 pm. Studying from 9 am until 10 pm for five days a week means 65 hours of school a week, thirteen hours longer than the longest legal working week.
I saw the sad looks in the eyes of the elementary students in after-school classes. I saw how they channeled their restlessness, boredom, and frustration into anger, disruptive behavior, and lack of effort. One Friday, after the lesson was completed, I engaged in small talk with the second graders and asked if everyone was excited for the weekend. A girl responded, "No, I have to go to violin class."