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There was a moment when I thought I might get some honest answers.
“I spend too much time at school,” the discussion book read. “I want to spend more time playing with my friends, but my mom makes me spend all my free time studying.”
I’ve been teaching English to this class of Korean 5th graders for months, and we’ve all gotten comfortable. I was thinking, wow, maybe we can really talk about the intense studying kids do in Korea. Alas, as in many other situations I’ve encountered living here, I was way off.
“No,” they chorused. “We don’t think so.”
“You don’t think you spend too much time studying?” I asked.
“Not too much, Teacher, just normal.” Another added, “A lot of time studying is good.”
I probed further, “So you don’t want to spend more time playing with your friends, instead of studying?”
The oldest girl in my class thought for a few seconds, searching for the words. “No, Teacher. Not more time with my friends; playing with my computer is more fun. Studying a lot is good.”
Sigh. We just see things so differently.
The way I see it, studying in South Korea is out of control. Kindergartners are immersed in English five hours a day, moving through phonics, spelling, and grammar books higher than their level. At the private academy I work in, kids can start full-time, formal education as young as 3 years old. Forget naps, playing and snack time, we’re getting you ready for Harvard. All of you.
Photo: chasing butterflies
But it’s not enough that students just be good at English. Most kids attend Korean public school and then spend hours at private academies on nights and weekends. They study science, math, Chinese characters, Japanese, or literature. Most add piano, swimming, tae kwon do or art classes to fill any potential free time they might have.
I once mapped out the weekly schedules with a 1st grade class, and most of them easily had 7 different extra classes to attend each week. It’s hard for me to comprehend being in class so much at that age, but it’s extremely common. Kids attend schools so late that a law was recently passed prohibiting schools from having class past 10 pm, although it’s routinely broken.
When I was young, 5 or 6 pm would have been a late day at school. To comply with the new Korean law, a number of schools now start classes earlier in the morning. It of course sidesteps the issue that students are spending really long days in class. How do they keep up with it all?
Perhaps they are not handling it well, but there is a lot of pressure to be successful and kids are forced to respond to it. In the pas sixty years, South Korea has grown from a war-torn country to the world’s 15th largest economy. It’s no small feat, and Koreans are very proud of this progress.
I don’t think my students’ parents that went to school with limited heat and food would agree with me that their children should work less. After all, they’re the ones signing them up for all the classes. But at what point is the desire for the next generation’s success getting out of hand? Can I be the only one noticing the kids’ struggle?
I think many of the students are feeling stuck, but only some are comfortable admitting that they don’t like it. I see it in the diaries they write me each week. They write about staying up until the middle of the night to study and getting hit when they don’t do well enough on tests. A girl complained about her mom making extra homework and tests for her after she finished her schoolwork.
Quite boldly one day, a friendly 5th grade girl wrote in her diary: “Why Korean students study too hard? In Korean parents’ story, some of the parents just play after the school. Before they play all day but now, it’s not. It is opposite. Now, students go academy after school. In vacation, too. Please… can you just see what we do? We want to play! We don’t want to be studying machine!”
It think a lot of students feel like this, but it’s just not popular to say.
Her description of being a studying machine is an apt analogy. About four months into the school year, my kindergarten supervisor told us she needed “output”. The parents wanted to see what their students were accomplishing. My expat co-workers and I cocked our heads in confusion, wondering what 5-year-olds’ “output” would look like. I pictured my mom’s Christmas tree and my “output” hung on it: a red macaroni noodle picture frame with my smiling 5-year old face in the center.
That is not at all what my supervisor had in mind.
Photo: author
We were soon given three hundred page Curious George books to practice so the students could read to their moms from them each weekend. Then, we were given the sentences they’d memorize and recite. Three book reviews were due each Wednesday. Every Thursday there was a twenty word spelling test, and it didn’t stop there.
Most of the kindergardeners produced their “output”. The ones whose moms spoke English or hired private tutors, that is. Others were embarrassed they couldn’t do the work or just skipped school. My job was to push them harder. More output.
One student was falling asleep in class one morning, and I pushed her to keep reading until she admitted she stayed up until 1 am finishing her homework. I tried insisting she go lay down and take a nap, but her pride made her resist. It was just another hard day’s work for her.
I’m lost knowing how to deal with these situations because my own experiences contrast starkly with theirs. Growing up I loved going to school. I remember watching butterfly cocoons hatch, taking art projects home to hang on the fridge, and looking forward to summer vacations with friends. We had real vacations from school – there was no studying. Extra classes were for trouble makers or maybe the nerds. I couldn’t have dreamed of being at school until 10 pm.
So now as a teacher, I want to help my students learn the best way I know how. The idealist in me wants them to love learning too. For me it’s not about perfect scores but the progress you can’t measure, like kids’ increasing confidence and their making new friends.
I try hard to teach so my students to enjoy learning, but the system almost makes this impossible. The Korean system values long hours, a heavy workload, and cramming in as much information as possible. It’s awfully hard to get kids excited when so many of them already feel tired and burnt out.
This is the hardest part of my job: finding a balance when I’m caught between value systems. In many ways I’ve learned to adapt to the system. I can get my kids to fill out twenty pages in a workbook in 45 minutes and keep the 4th grade boys in their seats after a ten-hour school day.
I still can’t rationalize the excessive memorizing, studying, and writing my students have to do for my classes. I can’t ignore the pressure it puts them under. But if my students are right, and a lot of time studying is good, maybe it’s up to me to adapt. Like it or not, I’m part of the Korean school system – I do most of what’s expected of me. At least if I have kids someday, I’ll have plenty of reasons why they should never complain about school work.
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Yes! Michelle, I was going to write those exact words! The idea of those little “studying machines” breaks my heart too. I just can’t imagine it. So sad..what a wasted childhood
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Thanks for the kudos Michelle. I’m with you about the heart break. I’ve gotten close to a number of my students, and I hate watching how it affects them.
I agree with you on the factory aspect. The emphasis on memorization has stood in my way of really teaching countless times!
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This is so true and difficult to comprehend. My husband taught at a hogwan in South Korea over the summer, and I thought it was crazy enough that the kids went to English school for six hours a day, but when he told me that a lot of them left English school to go to music, math and language classes for the remainder of the daylight hours, I almost fell over. Here I was, enjoying a beautiful summer on Jeju Island in South Korea and these kids just went to school all day.
I guess it’s a cultural thing. Hard to understand, but maybe just the way it is. Perhaps when the current generation grows up, they’ll remember the stress and not push their kids so hard.
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Your point about when this generation grows up is one I think about a lot. I wonder whether they’ll look back and not want to put their kids through the same thing or if they’ll appreciate the progress their hardwork brought. I’m very curious to see.
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At the risk of sounding like I condone such unrealistic workdays for little kids, let me just say that I was the product of such a system. Not Korea, but India – which is not as bad as the situation you describe, but is still quite bent on making workhorses out of little kids. I did stay at school and at “tuition” classes for several hours more than I would in an American school and I can’t say I loved it, but it’s what all my friends were doing, and we formed a sort of camaraderie going through our excessively long school days.
More importantly, I complained too and so did all my friends, but we did the work all the same and I daresay, we like that we went through a more strenuous system and emerged from it with better Math, Science and English skills. My point is, this girl you mentioned in the story might have complained about having too much work but if she is given the choice to really do whatever she wants as opposed to study – she might still pick the studying. The spirit of cut-throat academic competition is ingrained so early and so deeply into you that you instinctively know that you can’t afford to be left behind in the race. When I was growing up, performing well academically was implicitly tied to my social status – so it was a no-brainer to want to participate in the rat race.
That said, I did always understand what was being taught and didn’t just spit it out. And out of my entire “work”-day, I liked best the teachers who worked with the system but with a twinkle in their eye. My favorite English teachers were the ones who got all the homework and grammar and testing and other boring stuff out of the way, and then pushed us to imagine, understand, create, roleplay. I guess they snuck in the fun with the chores. So, perhaps not all hope is lost for you.
I hope you are able to get through to the girl who reached out and are able to find your happy medium.
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You bring up some good points, Arti, and it’s fair for you to condone the system.
I agree with you that given the choice most of the kids wouldn’t study less because they’d either want to be with their friends or they’d feel a lot of family or social pressure to keep up, even if they were allowed to attend fewer classes. But I think it’s a fair point that I don’t hear of any kids that are given the choice, despite what I see as mental-overload.
Good to hear that the material sunk in with you. It seems that’s true for some of the students I teach, although not all.
If you have kids, do you think you’d have them similarly to the way you did?
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What’s the worst part of this is the fact that in the public schools, where I taught, the kids all sleep! They fall asleep in class because they were up late at the hagwons, studying, and they have to go to the hagwons to study because they fall asleep in their day classes! It’s a vicious, neverending cycle.
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Parents in Korea are the ones that need educating. This is really child abuse and in my country might end in your children being taken away by the authorities and you being put in jail.
For all the extra pain, is there any gain? Are they better off overall than kids from other, more balanced, societies? Another case of materialism out of control?
And, don’t forget the rates of suicide in South Korea among young people are one of the highest in the world. Check out http://esllanguageschools.suite101.com/article.cfm/suicideineducation for example.
On the other side of the coin, we let it happen while taking jobs in Korea to facilitate it. Isn’t it those from English-speaking countries that are providing much of this education?
Lamentation is nice, but it doesn’t change anything.
Greg Q.
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I agree with you entirely, that it’s a societal shift that would need to happen to make any sort of change. I’ve had Korean co-workers tell me that they don’t like raising their kids in this kind of system, but they feel like they have to because it’s so common and they don’t want their kids to fall behind. Similarly, my female Korean friends in their 20-30s tell me they don’t want to have kids and raise them in Korea – a number want Western boyfriends to have a chance to live in another country and raise kids there.
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The most heart breaking thing for me has been seeing my students crack under pressure. I try my best to at least make the homework I have to give “fun output.” I wonder how high the suicide rate has to keep climbing to before real pressure reducing reform is introduced?
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Thanks for such a great article. I teach at a hagwon in SK, and have definitely struggled with finding the line between what I think is a reasonable workload for my students, and what my supervisors want me to do. (Fortunately, my supervisors are pretty lenient with me at this point, so when I tell them no about certain things, they will sometimes let it go.) Every Saturday, when the kids are leaving class, the only homework I give them is to “Do something fun this weekend! Then tell me about it on Monday.” It’s the only homework they never do. And, in fact, sometimes they offer, “I took TOEFL!” as a fun activity. I tell them to try again.
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That’s awesome you have some autonomy to decide your students workloads and assignments – I’d say that’s pretty rare here!
I don’t know whether to laugh or be appalled that your student might say a TOEFL test is their fun activity, but I love that you don’t accept it as an answer.
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You wrote: “I tried insisting she go lay down and take a nap.” That should be “insisting she go LIE down”.
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/lay-versus-lie.aspx
James
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Very interesting article.
The opinions we have on education and on how much is too much are so culture dependent. I spent my childhood in France, my schooling was perhaps a middle ground between East Asia and America. I started school at age 3, and from age 6 onwards, studying until 4 or 5 pm was standard (and then there’s homework and clubs). I never resented the workload. I remember some tough winter mornings of waking up when the sun was not up yet, but then again I still have the same issue as an adult!
In middle school, I spent a semester in the US and was *amazed* at all the free time. What do you guys do with all that time? I remember being slightly bored when classes were done, but also slightly bored in class, as we just weren’t progressing at the same sustained pace I was used to – and enjoyed.
That said, having lived in Japan and now Korea, I tend to think the problem is not so much the hours than the method: memorizing and cramming rather than understanding and developping critical thinking skills. It’s pretty terrible if despite all these hours in school kids never learn to study smart.
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Bessie, I completely agree with you.
I taught at a hogwon in South Korea and remember how tough it was trying to get the students to think creatively. I truly think that when they don’t have time to play and explore and pursue their own interests, their creativity is stunted. The kids I did meet who had active imaginations were deemed as naughty by the other teachers, even though they performed well in terms of academics and behaviour in my books.
I tried to create lessons with a lot of imagination and hypothetical situations involved. The students associated the creativity with play, and would get pretty into it. Good luck to you!
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I hear you on the lack of creativity – my students are always asking for the “right” answer and really struggle if I say there’s more than one answer. My students have a lot of strengths but creativity is certainly not one of them!
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I see this all the time as well teaching in a hagwon in SK. Everyone here sees it as a badge of honor to study/work for crazy long hours when they are so unproductive. There was a recent article in the Korea Times about how much more they work here yet they are one of the most unproductive countries. They need to take another look at both their education system and the work ethic and scale down the times and up the productivity.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/koreatime_admin/LT/common/nview.asp?idx=1000&nmode=2
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Good article and discussion. This was one of my biggest problems with the culture of education in Korea. At the HS I taught at students were in school 12+ hours a day (plus half a day on Saturdays), the last three or four of which was basically an extended “study hall” where most of the students slept or goofed off. I realize the competitive nature of Asian cultures but these onerously long days seem almost more designed to weed out the “weak” or “lazy” than actually to educate or prepare students for successful and rewarding futures.
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I am teaching in South Korea, and I feel that there is a great deal of pressure to be perfect here. Children and adults are reluctant to use the English that they have studied in school during real life situations, because they are afraid of making a mistake or being shamed. The study for the test, but when it comes to speaking English, many people cannot apply what they have learned.
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I just returned to Canada from teaching at an academic girls’ highschool in Chuncheon, South Korea. Same situation in highschools, and it’s actually ‘worse’ in academic schools. My girls had class from 7.50am to 10pm and then had an hour of ’study time’ before heading home for the day. More than 12 hours a day at school, plus 5 hours every Saturday.
A lot of people comment that they find Korean teenagers very naive and sheltered, but can you really blame them? When do they have time to learn about life outside of school?!
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Agree agree agree. Great article, thanks for getting this out there. It can be so hard watching kids struggle under the pressure, little ones dragging themselves home at 10 pm after a 13 hour school day, and the unbelievably high suicide rate among children and teens.
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I enjoyed reading your article both because i can relate to your perspective and because I can tell your sympathy for your students is genuine.
I attended all levels of required schooling in both South Korea and the U.S., as in, I moved back and forth every couple of years from age 3 until 12th grade, so I am intimately familiar with both educational systems, the flaws and all. It would take hours for me explain what I perceive to be the the pros and cons of each system but I just wanted to share another perspective with you.
I think Koreans in generally are aware that there are deep flaws in the education system and there are certainly education experts who are more aware of the flaws than others (my own mother being one such expert who’s been advocating a chance for a long time). However, change will be slow to come by because of a combination of the following factors (and of course this isn’t an exhaustive list at all, just things on top of my head at the moment) – intense competition driven by limited opportunities (i.e. simple supply and demand in terms of work and marriage prospects down the road in a fairly closed society), a tradition of great emphasis on education since centuries ago (and academic excellence is usually most easily displayed in pedigree of the schools one attends), a shorter tradition of intense education established since the war (i.e. recent generations have seen how those who studied hard were able to pull themselves and their families out of post-war poverty into prosperity).
I am the first to point out that this is a very single-track mentality that feeds into a vicious cycle. I believe that children should have free time to play. I have sat next to Korea classmates who routinely fell asleep in class because they were so tired from the hakwons. The methods most certainly should change to encourage more creativity and free thinking. There are deep, deep flaws and I wouldn’t subject my own child to such a routine.
I enjoyed reading your article both because i can relate to your perspective and because I can tell your sympathy for your students is genuine.I attended all levels of required schooling in both South Korea and the U.S., as in, I moved back and forth every couple of years from age 3 until 12th grade, so I am intimately familiar with both educational systems, the flaws and all. It would take hours for me explain what I perceive to be the the pros and cons of each system but I just wanted to share another perspective with you.
I think Koreans in generally are aware that there are deep flaws in the education system and there are certainly education experts who are more aware of the flaws than others (my own mother being one such expert who’s been advocating a chance for a long time). However, change will be slow to come by because of a combination of the following factors (and of course this isn’t an exhaustive list at all, just things on top of my head at the moment) – intense competition driven by limited opportunities (i.e. simple supply and demand in terms of work and marriage prospects down the road in a fairly closed society), a tradition of great emphasis on education since centuries ago (and academic excellence is usually most easily displayed in pedigree of the schools one attends), a shorter tradition of intense education established since the war (i.e. recent generations have seen how those who studied hard were able to pull themselves and their families out of post-war poverty into prosperity). Even the emphasis on memorization probably stemmed from (I’m guessing since I’m not expert) having to teach large numbers of students when they built the schools from scratch post-war and also probably influenced by Japanese methods since the Japanese were quicker to adopt everything western, after which they quickly seized Korea under colonial rule for a few decades.
I am the first to point out that this intense competition and pressure is a very single-track mentality that feeds into a vicious cycle. I believe that children should have free time to play. I have sat next to Korea classmates who routinely fell asleep in class because they were so tired from the hakwons. However, the Korean system (and methods – I’m not being precise enough here but that’s because I am just a lay person, not an education expert) is not without merits. It works well in most disciplines, if one were to make a strictly test-based comparison against American students. From my years of Korean schooling, I learned diligence and unsurpassed work ethic – the kind of work ethic I did not witness again until I saw workers at cream of the crop institutions in corporate America 10 years after leaving my Korean high school (I am in my late 20s now). My inflexibly standard Korean textbook education EXPOSED me to a wide range of topics that are generally known to ‘educated’ people that have received a classical education in the west, and speaking from experience, in terms of simple exposure, I am confident that a standard Korean public education was several notches above standard public education in the U.S. (I remain impressed by specialty and certain private prep schools in the U.S.) The reason I emphasize the word ‘exposure’ is because in many cases the Korean textbooks only introduced me to concepts or great works of art of buzzwords, and it was up to me to have enough intellectual curiosity to follow up on my own and/or recall those concepts when they came up again my future education or reading. In other words, what began with an enormous amount of rote memory paid greater dividends down the road.
I apologize if I am all over the place but I really only meant to make a few points. Yes, the system is deeply flawed, 1) but it became that way due to a great number of cultural, economical and historical reasons, so although hopefully change is on its way those changes will be slow, 2) and although better methods certainly exist, Korea is doing a fairly good job as compared to other countries, given that no country has mastered this really, 3) because of cultural factors coming into play, such as simply a higher tolerance/emphasis/acceptance of/on extremely hard work, one cannot view what’s going on with a western perspective and 4) most importantly (and really, this was why I started writing this reply in the first place), believe it or not, a vast majority of your students will survive just fine and even look back upon their school years fondly. Like I said, I can feel your genuine sympathy for your students, so hopefully knowing that they will grow up mostly unscathed (and at least there’s zero gun violence in Korea) will unburden you a little bit.
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