That's right, I'm starting early with the memes today
I wasn't given much information about what the process entailed so on the bus ride there I was envisioning an American Idol type setup. The students come into a room with myself and the other 3 judges, we listen to them speak English for a bit, then critique them while taking carefully timed sips of our Coca-Colas and squabbling with each other while the student awkwardly stands there.
I was disappointed. It turned out that there was only one other judge, we wouldn't even be in the same room, and, worst of all, there was no Coca-Cola. We each had to choose 3 or 4 questions to ask the students during our interviews. I went with future plans: what do you want to be, where do you want to travel to, do you think English will help you in your life, etc. I'm sure you're all thinking, "oh okay, he's strategically asking these questions to see if they can use the future tense." You're giving me way too much credit. In reality, I had been reading a lot about the Korean education system and I selfishly wanted to use this opportunity to get some insight into how these top-of-their-class students felt about their future. This would turn out to be a good decision.
First of all, their English levels were incredible. So incredible in fact, that one of the students I interviewed had actually lived in LA for half of her life and I didn't figure it out until she told me at the very end. That is to say, their English levels were so high that the essentially native speaker didn't even stick out. Out of 16 students, I had to choose the top 8. The 8 that got in all spoke basically perfect English. The 8 that didn't get in were eliminated because of one or two mistakes where they mispronounced a word (I let aurora borealis slide), worded a sentence unnaturally, or made a mistake because of some obscure English grammatical rule that I couldn't even explain if I tried. The feeling of eliminating them for such petty reasons, knowing how disappointed they would be, made me feel like the biggest asshole south of the demilitarized zone.
How the students who got denied probably viewed me
What was more impressive than their English level, however, was how well-planned their lives were and how knowledgeable they were of the fields they wanted to go into. They knew what they wanted to do, where they wanted to study, where they wanted to work, and were already reading up on their chosen field. These were 7th and 8th graders! When I was in middle school, I hardly thought past whatever sporting event was coming up or what kind of mischief my friends and I were going to get into that weekend. These kids were already preparing to be diplomats, astrophysicists, and behavioral economists. And could speak to me, at length in their second language, about those fields. While I was supposed to be listening to them for any slight mistake, I was, instead, having an out of body experience where all I could think was "Am I really discussing quantitative behavioral finance with a Korean 8th grader right now?"
It's fairly common knowledge that Korean schools, parents, and society put an enormous amount of pressure on children to succeed academically. In addition to regular school hours, hagwons, private academies that students go to after regular school hours, have become increasingly popular. A majority of elementary and middle school students go to hagwons and almost all high school students do. The average high school student's academic day is about 18 hours long, often starting at 6 in the morning and not ending until after midnight. A common rule of thumb for high school students in Korea is that "if you're getting more than 4 hours of sleep per night, you won't get into one of the top universities."
So what are the results of this pressure-cooker, hyper-competitive education system?
Well, from a purely academic standpoint, the system is very effective. Three-quarters of students go on to attend college and the latest OECD rankings put Korea as the 5th best education system in the world, and the four ranked above them are either small city-states or are currently under investigation for manipulating their results. But it would be extremely naive to just look at this purely in terms of academic performance while ignoring the social aspects of it. For the parents, this system has led to crippling debt, as they spend, on average, over half of their salaries on their child's education. For the students themselves, it's pretty well documented how bad Korea's suicide problem is. Thirty years ago, Korea's suicide rate was at a normal level, 7 per 100,000 people, but it has now risen to 29 per 100,000 people, more than double the average for the 30 OECD countries. Suicide is the number one cause of death for Koreans under age 40.
Is there anything that can be done to fix the destructive education fever?
It seems like this is a case where society is just going to have to wait for this fever to subside. We tend to forget that the price of education is supposed to correspond to a real, tangible value: the increased earnings that that education will gain you over the course of your lifetime. In Korea, people have stopped viewing education as an investing decision and have started viewing it as something that a good parent just has to unquestioningly do for their children, even if the return on investment doesn't make sense. A recent study showed that Korea is graduating approximately 40% more students from university than its economy has use for. Eventually, people will realize that the equation just isn't adding up and that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a child's education so that they can get into a good university and then only have a 60-40 chance of using that degree just isn't worth it. It's surprising, isn't it? In a country whose students rank fifth in the world in mathematics, so many social ills could be solved if people would just do the math.
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