The Heat of Korean Education — Its Light and Its Shadow

The third Thursday of November in Korea is a strange day. The stock market opens an hour late. Public offices delay their start. Certain airspace closes during specific windows. Police motorcycles ferry late students to exam sites. This is the College Scholastic Ability Test, Suneung. Few countries have an entire generation put the day on hold.

The world's longest study hours

Open any OECD chart and Korean teens lead most years in total study hours. Combining school and private tutoring, it's common for high schoolers to spend 10 to 14 hours a day at a desk. The private tutoring market runs at roughly 26 trillion KRW per year, centered on geographic phenomena: the hagwon districts. Daechi-dong, Mokdong, Junggye-dong in Seoul. At 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., kids pour out of private academies.

Foreigners seeing this scene for the first time almost always ask: Why that much?

The weight of a single exam

Korean college admissions aren't actually decided by Suneung alone. Multiple tracks coexist: holistic review of school records, essays, practical tests, early admissions, and regular admissions. But as a social symbol, Suneung still carries the feeling of being "the one exam that decides your life." Many early-admission tracks impose minimum Suneung grade requirements, and the regular-admission share is hardly small.

The problem is the weight of that feeling. Students, parents, grandparents, and relatives all tense up together that day. Juniors wait at exam site gates with chapssaltteok (sticky rice cakes, a symbol of "sticking" to the answer). Churches and temples fill with people praying from dawn. The collective immersion is rarely seen anywhere else in the world.

Light — education as a ladder of class mobility

To understand why Koreans cling to education this hard, you have to look at history. The 500 years of Joseon were the age of the state examination. Regardless of birth, passing the exam meant you could become an official. That formula has been carved deep into the Korean collective memory. It survived even in the rubble after liberation and the Korean War. "I suffered because I wasn't educated. I'll do whatever it takes to educate my child." That single sentence was spoken millions of times by Korean parents from the 1950s through the 1980s.

And it worked. The farm boy entered Seoul National University and became a corporate executive. The factory worker's daughter became a doctor. Korean students still rank at the top of PISA scores in reading, math, and science. Few countries have driven illiteracy to nearly zero within a single generation.

Shadow — lowest happiness, lowest birth rate

But look at a different row on the same statistical table and the story changes. Korean teens rank near the bottom of the OECD in subjective happiness. The youth suicide rate remains persistently high. The total fertility rate has fallen into the 0.7 range. The fear of throwing yet another child into this education war makes young couples hesitate.

Parents know this, and yet cannot stop. If the neighbor's child is sent to academy, you cannot be the only one who isn't. This is not an individual problem — it is a structural trap of collective action.

Can we call the abnormal simply abnormal?

Foreign media sometimes call Korean education "inhumane." Not entirely wrong. But that alone doesn't describe it. What this system produced — near-zero illiteracy, top-tier basic academic ability, a single-generation economic leap — is real. The pain this system produced — the low youth happiness, the low birth rate — is also real.

Most Koreans are aware of both sides at once. The guilt of knowing and still not being able to change it may be the deepest shadow in Korean society.

Education is both hope and prison. In Korea, especially so.