Schooling on steroids

Imagine if teenagers went to school at 7am, had classes until 5pm, then were kept at school for independent study until 10pm, after which they went for private tutoring, finally falling into bed at 1:30am. Why am I making up such a ridiculous thing? I'm not. That's reality in South Korea:

Oh Hyun Chul, a 16-year-old high school student with a crew cut, is what South Korean parents would call a "good" kid.

He wakes up every weekday at 6 a.m. and is at school by 7:20. He does not return home until 1:30 a.m. the next morning, after an evening spent in after-school classes and tutorial sessions at a private institute.

That leaves him with about four hours of sleep. But he finds nothing unusual about it; most of his friends - and most of the nation's high school students - are doing the same.

"I snatch a nap here and there, during 10-minute breaks between classes and on the bus," the lanky teenager said.

"We have an old rule of four versus five. You can enter the college you want if you sleep only four hours a day, but you won't if you sleep five or more. You get used to it."

This is, obviously, an untenable system. This past weekend close to 400 students held a protest in Seoul, in part to mourn the deaths of 15 fellow students who have killed themselves since February. A major Korean newspaper editorialized: "If students have the time to protest, they should use that time to study."

One reason parents and students put up with years of misery is that Korean employers apparently place so much emphasis on where a student went to college and what grades they got while there (see previous link):

In South Korea, the college a student attends "virtually determines his future for the rest of his life," said Kim Dong Chun, a sociologist at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul.

A worker's salary, position and prestige in his 60s often have less to do with his job performance than with whether he passed an exam to enter an elite university when he was 19.

A friend from South Korea once invited me over to watch DVDs of a popular Korean TV show, in which three bachelors competed for a date with a bachelorette. The three men would walk onto stage, ready to answer the bachelorette's questions. On the screen beneath each of them was listed their age, the name of their college, and their GPA.

College admissions were at that time based on a single exam score, so I guess this test also influences whom you can marry. According to the above article, during testing mothers would go to church to pray, and the Korean Air Force would suspend flights so as not to bother the exam-takers.

The problem this year is that the Minister of Education and Human Resources-- a title which hints at what is wrong with Korean schooling-- decided to include high school grades in the college admissions criteria. At first glance, using grades as well as the exam score seems like a good idea, as it makes for a more well-rounded assessment. Unfortunately, it has created extreme competition between students, which in part led to that recent student protest:

The new college admission system requires teachers to grade students on a relative scale in an attempt to prevent inflated grades. Through the plan, which aims to normalize public education, the ministry hopes school assessment will become more reliable to universities and colleges by putting more weight on school grades in the admission process.

Students criticize the relative grading system, however, for allowing a limited number of students to obtain certain grades and causing fierce competition among peers.

I couldn't believe what The Korea Times had to say about the protest:

It is deplorable that hundreds of high school students took to the street Saturday night to hold a candlelight rally to protest against the new college entrance system, which will give more weight to high school performances. No matter what the circumstances, their protest is intolerable in light of the challenge of the government authority even by teenagers who ought to be groomed away from social problems as much as possible.

South Koreans must feel that their extremely rapid industrialization is the result of the mass socialization of schooling, and therefore they are still willing to put up with this inhumane school system. However, they are eliminating any chance of moving into a post-industrial, post-assembly-line economy. They are raising a generation of young adults who will be incapable of critical or truly scientific thinking, who will be incapable of innovation, who will merely be automatons in the workplace.

Furthermore, they can expect to see an enormous decline in their birth rate. These pressure cooker societies with extensive and strict schooling, constant competition, high real estate prices, and demanding work environments are not exactly designed for having children. Just look at Japan.

What a totally family-destroying, immoral, miserable system. And in the end it will only harm South Korea.