Education Fever

Introduction

1 Introduction A great air of tension hovered throughout South Korea on 17 November 1999. A special task force had spent months planning for that day. The night before, President Kim Dae Jung had appeared on television to announce that the nation was prepared for the event. All nonessential governmental workers would report to work only later in the morning, as would employees of major ¤rms. Thousands of special duty police were on hand in many cities; thirteen thousand police had been mobilized in Seoul alone. Flights at all the nation’s airports had been restricted, and special efforts had been made to halt construction to avoid creating noise or commotion of any kind.1 It was the day of the national university entrance examinations. For weeks Buddhist temples had been ¤lled with hopeful parents and students; in fact, churches and temples received a large proportion of their annual revenues from the donations of these hopefuls. Shamans and vendors of amulets and “lucky” sticky candy had been doing a brisk business. It would be a day for which young men and women had prepared since elementary school, if not before , and for which parents had sacri¤ced a large portion of their income. The college entrance examinations provide a vivid example of what Koreans sometimes calltheir“education fever” (kyoyuk yôlgi). Education isa national obsession in South Korea. Everywhere there are “cram schools” (hagwôn), where elementary, middle, and high school students study late in the evening and on weekends. Every neighborhood has a store selling textbooks, supplementaryreadings ,andguidesto theentranceexaminations.Adults,too,studyat night schools, attempting to advance their education. Real estate prices depend 2 introduction as much on the reputation of local schools as on the inherent desirability of the location or the quality of housing. South Korean families invest heavily in the education oftheir children, and children and young adults spend a huge portion of their time studying and preparing for examinations. Education pops up in conversation often, and the success of a son, daughter, or grandchild at entering a “good” school is a source of great pride. Although education is important in every nation, even casual visitors become aware of the intense preoccupation of South Koreans with schooling. This was certainly true of the author, who ¤rst arrivedinKoreatotakeajobteachingEnglishatauniversityinSeoul,withlittle knowledge of the country and its culture but with experience working in other developing nations. It did not take long to discover how important education was to the Koreans the author met. Later the author participated in a number of in-service training programs for middle and high school teachers and was invitedtovisitprovincialurbanandruralschools .Itbecameapparentthattheconcern for educational attainment was not con¤ned to the urban middle class of the capital but was an all-pervasive feature of South Korean society. This obsession with formal learning has accompanied a remarkable educational transformation of South Korea in the half century after its liberation from Japan. In 1945, when the thirty-¤ve-year Japanese colonial rule in South Korea ended, the majority of adult Koreans were illiterate. Mass primary education had only recently begun, and less than 5 percent of the adult population had more than an elementary school education. There was only one university in Korea, and most of its students were Japanese. Five decades later, virtually all South Koreans were literate, all young people attended primary and middle schools, and 90 percent graduated from high school. There were over 180 colleges and universities, and the proportion of college-age men and women who enrolled in higher education was greater than in most European nations. The quality of education was high as well—at least judging by comparative international tests. These tests usually rate the math and science skills of South Korean primary and secondary students as among the highest in the world.2 Therapid expansion ofstate-directedformaleducationinthesecondhalfof the twentieth century is not unique to South Korea. National educational systems developed at impressive rates during this period in both Koreas. The growth of formal schooling in South Korea was part of what has been called the “Educational Revolution,” the global expansion of national education systems that occurred after World War II and was especially dramatic in the developing introduction 3 world. The post-1945 era saw the emergence of many new independent states and the generalacceptance ofuniversalliteracyas anationalgoalin almostevery state.3 Yet even if we place South Korea’s educational development within the context of this Educational Revolution, it...