Korea

What is Korea known for? - Jason Song

“Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea every year.” As Barack Obama, the president of the United States of America, iteratively emphasizes, the harsh and competitive education in Korea is one of the most distinctive features of Korea to which many people in the world may pay attention. Students should stay and study in school or academy until 10 o’clock and are expected to get a high grade compared to their classmates in tests. This peculiarly intense system originated from the inevitable circumstance of Korea and brought about many positive influences to Korean but, at the same time, results in some criticism as well. So let’s take a look at Korean education system’s origin, positive aspects and problems.

Why did it begin?

Korea’s competitive education system has a direct bearing on Korea’s environmental characteristics. In fact, Korea’s territory is not really big enough, considering the population of Korea. The relatively small domain causes two problems for a country’s development; the country does not have enough places for primary industries such as agriculture and has a less possibility of having natural resources. Hence, Korea also used to struggle with lack of natural resources. Inevitably, Korea should foster other type of resources, the human resource. Furthermore, the urbanization of Korea and global trend which requires highly intelligent people enhances the parents’ desire to put their children through university. These factors made more and more competition among students and ultimately results in current education system of Korea.

Positive influences

Although Korea’s competitive education system is criticized because of the excessive competitions, still it largely contributes to Korea’s development in many ways. Primarily, numbers of students enter universities every year. According to the research conducted by OECD in 2012, 98 percent of people from 25 year old to 34 year old completed the high school course and 66 percent graduated college. Considering the fact that the averages of OECD are 82 percent and 39percent respectively, Korea’s ratio is truly astonishing and is indubitably on the top of OECD countries. As can be witnessed here, so many people each year graduate the higher education and this promotes the economic and technological growth of Korea. Many experts actually believe that Korea’s fast recovery and development after the Korean War, despite its shortage of resources, attributes to this educational system which enables to foster human resources. Indeed, thanks to the contribution of those human resources, Korea has the highest internet penetration rate and its shipbuilding industry became the best in the world. Without a great zeal of education, this achievement could have been impossible.

Side effects

Despite Korea’s education system benefits Korea a lot, it cannot be free from the criticism about its harshness and efficiency. The very first problem pointed out by many Koreans is its difficulty. Since Korean education system selects relative evaluation rather than absolute evaluation, inevitably, always some students must fail and only minority of students can pass. This became extremely stressful for students and it is again proved by the statistic of OECD showing that Korean young adult’s suicide rate is highest in the world. Moreover, because of the basic characteristic of relative evaluation that only few students can pass, it causes never-ending competition among students. As a result, student’s reliance on private education became higher and Korea became the country which spends the largest portion of people’s income in children’s education. This is closely related to the second problem of the education system in Korea, the efficiency. As a spending on education becomes a burden to carry, many people start casting doubt on so excessive an expenditure’s necessity. What’s more, people now realize that not every college graduate can have a vocation which demands the knowledge that they learn in college meaning that people start to recognize that college is not necessary for everyone.

All in all Korea’s education system exists as one of the most unique characteristics of Korea. Though still whether it is ideal is in dispute due to the criticism towards it, it is undeniable fact that it has upheld Korea’s continuous development and is a distinguishing feature of Korea.