The problem of private education in South Korea has led to educational inequality due to excessive competition and reliance on private education. It is important to restore the role of public education and increase the credibility of public education by strengthening teacher professionalism, developing quality educational materials, and engaging the community.
South Korea is a global center for private education. While the concept of private education is not new to other countries, there are probably only a handful of countries where it has such a huge economic and social impact as in South Korea and its neighbors Japan and China. South Korea has the largest market for private education. In fact, private education in South Korea is an ongoing debate. The main problem is the overwhelming demand for education, which has led to ever-increasing prices and the resulting gap in educational opportunities between rich and poor. Another problem is that learning through private education is being taken for granted over public education, which should be prioritized, and the purpose of school is being lost.
The purpose of public education is for students to experience the basics of group life before entering the workforce and to develop the skills necessary for social life, but school is obviously a place for learning. However, students in South Korea nowadays believe that hagwons, not schools, are the main place to learn. While there is a general consensus that these issues are sufficiently raised in society and should be addressed, the reality is that simply saying “we shouldn’t do this” is not enough to solve the problem, and policy solutions are needed to change people’s consciousness and strengthen public education. The Korean government has implemented a number of policies in this regard, but the wrong approach to the issue of private education has led to the rise of private education and the weakening of public education.
In the past, the first thing that was blamed for the overdevelopment of private education was vocational schools. There are several specialized schools in Korea. Starting with science high schools, there are foreign high schools, jasago, and gifted and talented high schools, all of which are public education institutions that provide specialized education to foster specific talents. Of course, in the case of Jasago, some of them are run by private institutions, but they are still schools, so they are not classified as private education. These special purpose high schools used to screen students through tests to determine whether or not they were capable of completing their curriculum. In this process, they often ask students about extracurricular content to make the tests more competitive, and this is what has led to the criticism that they are the cause of private education. However, this is something to think about. Special purpose schools were established to select outstanding talents, provide specialized education, and ultimately produce excellent human resources for the country. Therefore, the tests used to select talented students need to be discriminating. However, this is not the case when you think about whether or not these schools are giving test questions that can only be learned from other private institutions. Most of the questions on the test were designed to test students’ ability to deduce higher-level concepts from their coursework or to test their creativity in problem solving. However, students who have learned higher-level concepts in private schools obviously have a huge advantage in taking these tests, so parents often send their children to private schools to get an advantage, and even if they don’t, if other students do, they will be left behind and feel insecure. For this reason, since the 2010s, the government has prohibited special schools from requiring extracurricular courses, and even drastically reduced the advantages in college admissions that exclusivity and other special schools had, in an effort to equalize high schools.
One of the other reasons cited in the past was college entrance exams. In the past, if you wanted to go to a certain college, you had to take a test that the college gave you, and that test would determine whether or not you got in. These tests were quite challenging, and I and other students actually took them during our post-secondary education. In my experience, the math problems on the college entrance exams of the 1980s were often of high quality and mathematically meaningful, synthesizing the concepts taught and making them “pretty”. However, this system was abolished and replaced by the SAT, which was considered too competitive and promoted private education. In recent years, in the name of reducing private education, the SAT has been mostly taken from EBS lectures and the standard has been lowered to a very low level. As a result, there are many students who watch the SAT and EBS lectures without any discrimination every year. As a result, the quality of education in Korea is falling further than in the past.
The problem with the current education policy is that it lowers the overall level of education in order to prevent private education. The solution they think is to require only a level of ability that does not require private education. However, if we consider whether these proposals have reduced private education, they have not. According to a survey conducted by the National Human Rights Commission and the Ministry of Education, 70.7% of respondents still said, “I or my children receive private education,” and students still go to halls after school day and night to study.
In order to reduce private education, the country needs to focus on other issues. In this article, I will argue that the problem with the current education system is that it does not focus on educators. In fact, many teachers who started their teaching career in public education with the intention of becoming educators end up in private education. If you refer to the statistics of the Ministry of Education’s “Private Education Awareness Survey,” you will find that there are actually cases of educators who used to work in public education leaving for private education, and if you ask them why, there are three main reasons. First, it can be more economically beneficial. Second, they want to pursue higher education that suits their abilities, but it’s hard to find students who want to hear about it in public education. Third, public schools have too many non-teaching duties that make it difficult for them to focus on teaching and give good instruction, which is why many good teachers who are talented and committed to education end up in private education, or start out in private education. Therefore, it is inevitable that the quality of private education is higher than public education.
In addition, there are many other problems that are more fundamental than the problems of the education system that Korea is currently focusing on. Simply lowering the expected level of education like the current education policy will not solve the problems of the education system. There is a widespread belief in South Korea that private education is better than public education. However, in any country in the world, schools were created for the development of learning and the transmission of knowledge. However, it is very unfortunate that Korea is slowly losing its original function. Although the system of private education is too deeply rooted in our society to make major changes to the education system that has developed so far, it is undoubtedly true that it is time to make major changes to the education system in Korea, as we are fully aware that it is more urgent to reclaim the role of public education. Therefore, we must quickly identify the underlying problems and change the education system.
In addition, it is also essential to make institutional complements to balance public and private education. For example, to improve the quality of the school curriculum, we need to strengthen training programs to increase the professionalism of teachers and develop high-quality teaching materials for schools. In addition, we need to improve the environment in and around schools so that students can focus on their studies, and revitalize educational communities that involve parents and communities to increase the credibility of public education. This will help develop a healthy education system in Korea.
