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As someone who has taught in Korea for the last 3 years, I have an insight into Korean education and the problems associated with it. I will discuss, maybe in a few blogs if it gets decent reviews, how the education system is now detrimental to the country, and how they should make changes to allow for a better life for students, and how it will also boost the country in different areas such as sport, academic fields and general life of people. In this blog, I will talk about the problems of just the education system, and later I will discuss how it affects other areas of national identity.
The education system in Korea is highly rated. It is often placed top (recently beaten by Finland) and has rarely placed outside the top 5. It is also no secret that students in Korea work insanely hard. From elementary school through to high school, the students are almost forced to study, and will spend around 9 or 10 hours a day studying (elementary) to 12+ in high school.
Most people here have passed through the western style of education. Students will start around 9am and finish around 3 (different countries have different times, but its roughly this). That's roughly 6 hours of school. Then after that there will be projects and homework which flesh out the time more to 8 or 9 hours depending on the country that you studied in, and also what you decide to study later on. However, in Korea, students will go to school around 9, finish at 3, do their school homework until they go to Hagwons, which are usually an extra hour of study in a specific field of study, then do the homework for that. This applies to elementary and middle school. So students from the age of 6-15 will study up to 11 hours if they do an hour homework for each of the areas (school and 2 hagwons). It sounds too much, and in honesty it is.
Up to middle school, students are studying more than they get relaxation time. Most of us here remember fondly our time of running out and playing sports with friends, relaxing and watching movies and playing video games. Children here get very little of this down time, but that's the way it is in Korea.
High school is a completely different kettle of fish. My (soon to be) wife's father is a high school teacher, and he is in work from 7 am till 11pm (depending on the rota), and students are doing those hours 6 or 7 days a week. They do their lessons, then they have monitored study time which usually ends with students catching up on sleep, as they have homework and free study too, and are monitored by teachers to DO these hours, and not skimp out on that extra bit of study. High school is between the age of 15-18 (when UK students go to College) and they study around 15 subjects including math, english, science and other languages. It's insane amount of work!
The amount of studying burns students out. Imagine being at university, and studying for 12+ hours a day. It would have KILLED me and many of my friends. We probably would have dropped out, and just said fuck it and accept a job in a field where we work 8 hours and that's it. But the students have no choice, to maintain that top 5 education rating. The adults in Korea also have the mindset that 'we did it, so can they'. Back then, they needed that to help pull them up out of a poverished nation to where they are now. Now, not so much.
To prove that students are burned out, lets look at the top universities. If their high school and below system is so great, surely their university system is ranked highly too.
#37 Seoul National University (SNU) South Korea 82.2
#63 KAIST - Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology South Korea 71.8
#97 Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) South Korea 66.8
Those are the top 3 universities in Korea. There are almost 150 universities here, and their 3rd best just about breaks the top 100. Why do they drop so badly from top 3 for high school and below, and dropping down to those rankings for university. The students are burned out. After 12 years of insane study, the students are done. They can't continue anymore, they are tired with the education system that has sucked the life out of them. Now let's look at the top 10 universities in the world.
#1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) United States 100
#2 University of Cambridge United Kingdom 99.8
#3 Harvard University United States 99.2
#4 UCL (University College London) United Kingdom 98.7
#5 University of Oxford United Kingdom 98.6
#6 Imperial College London United Kingdom 98.3
#7 Yale University United States 97.5
#8 University of Chicago United States 96.3
#9 Princeton University United States 95.4
#10 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) United States 95.1
Now compare that to their high school and below rankings
United States: 17th
United Kingdom: 25th
The education systems with a mid level review end up with the best higher education rankings. The students in these countries are not worked to death, are not forced to study for 12+ hours a day and their universities end up higher. We can see with this small example, how university in these countries are severely out-performing Korea.
Next part I will discuss content and focus in different countries (most likely Kr Vs. UK)
Notes:
USA shows up 31 times in the top 100, and the UK shows up 18 times in the top 100.
University rankings taken from: http://www.university-list.net/rank.htm
High school education rankings taken from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading
Korean rankings taken from: http://www.4icu.org/kr/
  
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The US news ranking that you are using is based on the QS World university ranking, which is a very poor ranking, IMO. It is heavily based on academic peer review, which basically means that the ask professors which universities are the best. There are a lot of problems with this, but the biggest problem as far as your post is concerned is that the "best university" to a professor is the one that is best at research. They aren't concerned at all with what the undergraduates are doing.
(Edit) The other criteria that the QS rankings use are also quite strange. The QS ranking was originally the Times ranking, but they moved on to a different ranking in 2009. My personal guess is that the ranking was designed to favour UK universities, since UK universities do quite well in the ranking compared to other rankings.
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Hong Kong9148 Posts
There are a number of intervening variables in the analysis as to why American universities manage to remain highly ranked despite having such a shit compulsory education scheme. The primary one I will point to is the substantial role that federal grants and subsidies given to research universities play in fostering excellent faculties and research. There is also the fact that these factors do not figure into the traditional undergraduate's experience.
Out of shit compulsory education comes shit undergraduates, and countless more who do not even go to university in this country. A better test to show the effectiveness of schools with this in mind would be to ignore university world rankings and focus on literacy and knowledge rates of the general population instead.
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I think it's really unfair to look at the university system and compare that to what the middle/high school system is like. I'm a masters student at Yonsei, and lots of my friends are from SNU/Yonsei/KU and talking to them...while burnout does happen, I don't think that's in anyway evidence of how good/bad the system is. And I'm speaking as a hagwon teacher that teaches kids that do the hagwons till 1-2 AM and start again at 7 AM.
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On January 23 2013 15:15 Chaggi wrote:
I think it's really unfair to look at the university system and compare that to what the middle/high school system is like. I'm a masters student at Yonsei, and lots of my friends are from SNU/Yonsei/KU and talking to them...while burnout does happen, I don't think that's in anyway evidence of how good/bad the system is. And I'm speaking as a hagwon teacher that teaches kids that do the hagwons till 1-2 AM and start again at 7 AM.
Burning out students is a bad thing. A burned out student can drop all academic focus, and move onto working in a family mart or just not want to get a job. The 20-30 year olds in Korea now have a high unemployment level. I feel this is a side-effect of burning out during education. Study study study but there's no ethic there to work for yourself. They feel that they should have a high paid job, but seemingly they refuse to work the lower wage jobs to tide them over till they get a high paid job.
A good system would not burn out a student, nor over work them. A good system should be an efficient system. Overworking is not efficient, sleeping in school is not efficient. And it's not just the school system that has the problem with overworking and burning out. Because the school system instills the ideology of study till you drop, you get office workers who work 60+ hours a week to do work they could efficiently do in 40 hours. They sleep at their desks, stay late as to please the boss and save face, which in turn means they lose family time and other things which are more important than work.
Yes the university rankings are whack as shit, but I'm not sure how to show objective ranks. Literacy and numeracy levels are all good, and are an effective level for elementary and middle school, but after that literacy levels just can't be applied to university undergrads. Testing systems for universities are almost impossible to quantify, and this system is probably the most widely used system.
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On January 23 2013 15:15 Chaggi wrote:Yes the university rankings are whack as shit, but I'm not sure how to show objective ranks. Literacy and numeracy levels are all good, and are an effective level for elementary and middle school, but after that literacy levels just can't be applied to university undergrads. Testing systems for universities are almost impossible to quantify, and this system is probably the most widely used system. Research achievement is much easier to quantify, and there are some good rankings that focus on this. My favourite is the Shanghai ranking, although it is biased towards STEM disciplines.
What you want is a ranking that focuses on undergraduate education, which is much harder to quantify. Most rankings don't even try. One ranking that does study undergraduate education is the Macleans magazine ranking of Canadian universities. I think this is a pretty good ranking, although not without its problems. One major component of their ranking is the reputation of the university among (Canadian) corporate recruiters and CEOs. Since Canadian companies tend to hire from a wide spectrum of Canadian universities, employers likely have a good idea of the differences between universities, so I think this is a good metric to include.
The QS ranking also includes recruiter reputation, but for a world ranking I think this is a bad idea. It's simply too hard to get a representative sample of recruiter opinions from around the world. And even if you do manage to include, say, a lot of Korean employers, they most likely mainly hire graduates from Korean universities. How are they supposed to objectively compare Korean universities with British or American universities?
I'm not even sure that it makes sense to compare undergraduate education between cultures. With very few exceptions, undergraduate education prepares students to take a role in their own society. In other words, if you want to get a job in country X, you're probably best off getting an education in country X. So how can you compare education in country X with education in country Y?
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Yeah, Korea schooling system seems wack, but so is North America's. A balance of the two is what's needed.
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While I agree that students in SK are spending way too much time studying, your support for your argument is just downright irrelevant. University rankings are heavily based on research and South Korea universities simply dont have the tradition nor the funding to compete with the already established universities like Harvard or MIT. To prove my point, you mentioned Finland as having the best educational system in the world. Where are Finland universities in the rankings?
The real problem, or tragedy as I'd like to call it, is being such a consumerist society. SK is such a small country and with that comes peer pressure and constantly comparing with each other. I've lived half of my life in SK and the other half in US, and I compare SK as high school and US as college. The pressure to conform is much higher is SK and people are very blunt about it too. It's all well to say "oh just live your life and be happy" but when housing costs and unemployment rates are rising and there aren't enough "good jobs" to satisfy the material needs, the society will become more and more competitive for those jobs and people see education as the means to achieve that. Students study hard not just because they are forced to study hard, but because the competition for good jobs are fierce. My theory is that if the economy improves and better jobs are created, students won't need to study as hard. I guess it's sort of like the chicken or the egg argument in that some people see the educational system as the problem whereas I see the educational system as the result of the economic problem.
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On January 23 2013 15:32 OptimusYale wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2013 15:15 Chaggi wrote:
I think it's really unfair to look at the university system and compare that to what the middle/high school system is like. I'm a masters student at Yonsei, and lots of my friends are from SNU/Yonsei/KU and talking to them...while burnout does happen, I don't think that's in anyway evidence of how good/bad the system is. And I'm speaking as a hagwon teacher that teaches kids that do the hagwons till 1-2 AM and start again at 7 AM. Burning out students is a bad thing. A burned out student can drop all academic focus, and move onto working in a family mart or just not want to get a job. The 20-30 year olds in Korea now have a high unemployment level. I feel this is a side-effect of burning out during education. Study study study but there's no ethic there to work for yourself. They feel that they should have a high paid job, but seemingly they refuse to work the lower wage jobs to tide them over till they get a high paid job. A good system would not burn out a student, nor over work them. A good system should be an efficient system. Overworking is not efficient, sleeping in school is not efficient. And it's not just the school system that has the problem with overworking and burning out. Because the school system instills the ideology of study till you drop, you get office workers who work 60+ hours a week to do work they could efficiently do in 40 hours. They sleep at their desks, stay late as to please the boss and save face, which in turn means they lose family time and other things which are more important than work. Yes the university rankings are whack as shit, but I'm not sure how to show objective ranks. Literacy and numeracy levels are all good, and are an effective level for elementary and middle school, but after that literacy levels just can't be applied to university undergrads. Testing systems for universities are almost impossible to quantify, and this system is probably the most widely used system.
Burning out students is of course bad, but that's not why students can't get jobs these days. There's a huge recession going on and there's just simply not enough jobs to go around. Almost everyone is getting a college degree in some manner or form. I worked for Samsung Group about 2 years ago, and when I was hiring my replacement, I was given a stack of resumes that were basically references from people within the company, and/or graduates of SNU/Yonsei/KU. The high unemployment isn't attributed to overworking during their school years.
That being said, you can't use students burning out = bad university because that's not how universities are ranked. Most are ranked based on research and other factors that undergrads don't even ever see. America is a great breeding ground for knowledge, and always has been. It's open-ness basically let's many schools prosper and a lot of funding attract students from around the world. If you look at Korea, there's not many masters/phd students that come to Korea, and many of the universities have only really been established in the last 100~ years. It's not that much history considering the turmoil that Korea has gone through in even the last 50-60 years. You don't become a great school in that short of a time.
I really think you're taking something that you see, and relating it to a problem that is not really directly correlated.
That being said though, there is a definite problem with the Korean school system past the high school level. They may learn a lot of memorization, and it can be a path to get into one of the top Ivy Leagues, and even a really well paying analyst job, but it doesn't promote creativity which can help a country develop and grow.
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On January 23 2013 16:06 dongmydrum wrote:
While I agree that students in SK are spending way too much time studying, your support for your argument is just downright irrelevant. University rankings are heavily based on research and South Korea universities simply dont have the tradition nor the funding to compete with the already established universities like Harvard or MIT. To prove my point, you mentioned Finland as having the best educational system in the world. Where are Finland universities in the rankings?
The real problem, or tragedy as I'd like to call it, is being such a consumerist society. SK is such a small country and with that comes peer pressure and constantly comparing with each other. I've lived half of my life in SK and the other half in US, and I compare SK as high school and US as college. The pressure to conform is much higher is SK and people are very blunt about it too. It's all well to say "oh just live your life and be happy" but when housing costs and unemployment rates are rising and there aren't enough "good jobs" to satisfy the material needs, the society will become more and more competitive for those jobs and people see education as the means to achieve that. Students study hard not just because they are forced to study hard, but because the competition for good jobs are fierce. My theory is that if the economy improves and better jobs are created, students won't need to study as hard. I guess it's sort of like the chicken or the egg argument in that some people see the educational system as the problem whereas I see the educational system as the result of the economic problem.
This is really true.
If you take a look at a traditional Korean male's life track, it's basically
Elementary School -> HS + hagwons
Get into a good college AND/OR have a great major (basically SKY + KAIST universities)
Give 18 months of the best time of your life to the military
Realize that the girls you knew before are now older and more mature, but they haven't had time to play around so they go out and party
Graduate with some degree
And hopefully find a job at a big company like Samsung where they work for the rest of their lives.
Hopefully get married or set up on a blind date/marriage based on what they look like on paper
???
Death
How everyone is treated in Korea is pretty much based on your looks, and what school you went to (anywhere from HS to university), and for the parents and students that understand that, studying for those few spots in these brand name schools is pretty much the only way to get ahead the Korean society.
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I got a korean girlfriend. And we study together in europe. She talked about the education system back home. There is so much on the line for their high school grades. And there is no way to change it after their high school exams. Basically they get put in different places according to their grades. A lot of her friends couldn't get into good schools because of it. Even though they could afford it.
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That being said though, there is a definite problem with the Korean school system past the high school level. They may learn a lot of memorization, and it can be a path to get into one of the top Ivy Leagues, and even a really well paying analyst job, but it doesn't promote creativity which can help a country develop and grow.
That's going to be my next write up I think, which will also include the problems of research and stuff like that.
Another problem with the school thing is that there is nothing else which goes onto your resume in Korea. There are very few clubs or things you can do that make you seem unique. A lot of western society add things like sports clubs, activity clubs and general interests such as scouting (my example), traveling, football, gaming. All those things are seen as irrelevant when new employees are chosen, and people are told to not add things like that to your resume or you won't get a job. Interests is what sets you apart from others in a way that education doesn't, and it shows a different side to you. The problem is is that students just CAN'T get into these things at a young age due to the pressures and time consuming nature of study. At university they join clubs and stuff like that, but a real passion should be developed at a young age, and you can go and use that passion to show that you are a well developed individual who can handle different situations and stuff. I can't tell you the amount of times scouting has come up in interviews I've had, and I hope that the passion I had for it comes through and they can see that I'm very passionate about what I did.
I'm not saying that burned out students is why the universities are lower ranked, what I'm saying is that burning out is part of the problem. The universities are generally good, but the university professors I've spoke to at a few institutions say that it's just not up to par. Those who study English for example, are expected to do similar activities to middle school students just a little bit more advanced. I'm not slating them across the board, but university from what I gathered from friends who went, is the time where they blow off steam as they worked so hard to get there. They end up not studying as hard (SKY is obviously an exception, as well as a few other universities) as they are done with studying and feel that once they're at university, as long as their grades are half way decent, they will end up in their career of choice.
I also feel it has something to do with the A B C D E F tests they get instead of essays throughout school, but I'll touch on that at a later point.
On January 23 2013 17:40 KAB00000000M wrote:
I got a korean girlfriend. And we study together in europe. She talked about the education system back home. There is so much on the line for their high school grades. And there is no way to change it after their high school exams. Basically they get put in different places according to their grades. A lot of her friends couldn't get into good schools because of it. Even though they could afford it.
The same happens in Europe. It doesn't matter how much money you have, your grades have to match to the institution you apply for. Oxford requires A A A and an exceptional interests to even be considered.
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But what are they studying in Korea? With that amount of time I would suppose they do Quantum Mechanics in High School, right?
University rankings have nothing to do with HS rankings. A system might be made to cater to the gifted and not to the average, and vice versa. Also note the amount of foreigners in UK/US universities. They are elite of the World, not the country.
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On January 23 2013 18:18 50bani wrote:
But what are they studying in Korea? With that amount of time I would suppose they do Quantum Mechanics in High School, right?
University rankings have nothing to do with HS rankings. A system might be made to cater to the gifted and not to the average, and vice versa. Also note the amount of foreigners in UK/US universities. They are elite of the World, not the country.
They study very similar stuff to what we study at that age. So high school level? They just have to memorise everything. I had students who, for middle school science, had to know all the elements of the periodic table in order and the atom counts and density for them all.
But they don't touch anything too deep until college level iirc. They will learn the basics of biology, chemisty and physics, but they won't be studying astrophysics and stuff like that. A general science level I guess.
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On January 23 2013 16:06 dongmydrum wrote:
While I agree that students in SK are spending way too much time studying, your support for your argument is just downright irrelevant. University rankings are heavily based on research and South Korea universities simply dont have the tradition nor the funding to compete with the already established universities like Harvard or MIT. To prove my point, you mentioned Finland as having the best educational system in the world. Where are Finland universities in the rankings?
The finnish universities are not very high in the rankings because Finland is a small country with 5,3 million people and like 10 universities, best of which is ranked somewhere between 70-80. Im not saying that OP is right with his statement about the uni rankings, Im just saying that you really didnt't "prove your point" that well with your statement on Finland.
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9 hours in the western world?
Germany, you go from 8 until 13:00, and homework rarely exceeded one hour for me.
What I would be most afraid of in the Korean system is that the bright students get burnt. I mean, some of them must be a lot quicker than the rest, and they have to stay around as well?
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On January 23 2013 20:39 Rimstalker wrote:
9 hours in the western world?
Germany, you go from 8 until 13:00, and homework rarely exceeded one hour for me.
What I would be most afraid of in the Korean system is that the bright students get burnt. I mean, some of them must be a lot quicker than the rest, and they have to stay around as well?
Yup yup yup.
Actually the brighter ones are pushed to do more than none bright ones. The bright ones will be put in higher level classes in hagwons, which means they get more homework than the normal students. In schools it's not divided by ability.
The finnish universities are not very high in the rankings because Finland is a small country with 5,3 million people and like 10 universities, best of which is ranked somewhere between 70-80. Im not saying that OP is right with his statement about the uni rankings, Im just saying that you really didnt't "prove your point" that well with your statement on Finland.
I knew the rankings were funky...but what else could I use to prove a half point  The rankings are very bias towards English speaking universities, similar to how 100 years ago the top ranked universities would have been latin universities as that was the language of academia.
I'm pretty sure that a degree in Finland gives a high employment rate as its only a select amount of people who actually go. I've seen rankings that use degrees and employability rate as a way to rank universities, but for the life of me I can't remember the system.
Just found a seriously interesting paper about this subject 
http://www.ukessays.com/essays/education/why-south-korean-universities-have-low-international-rankings-education-essay.php
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Netherlands45349 Posts
In the Netherlands at the ''highest'' level of high school education is 32hours a week of school. In the higher years its about 26-28 with the rest of the hours having to be filled with ''studying(aka doing nothing). The vast majority can pass High School in the Netherlands without studying ever except perhaps an hour or two before a test or exam.
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I see this problem is endemic to a few other East Asian countries as well, such as China, Japan and Singapore. The thing is I am not sure what can be done to change it, it seems more an outcome of intense competition to enter the top universities.
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While Korean education system is pretty harsh, it does produce much better results than Western education does. You can't deny the fact that on average, Koreans are far more hard-working and dedicated than literally any other society. The whole thing about 'studying too hard kills creativity' is a load of bollocks; there are plenty of excellent artists, designers etc in Korea - they're just not very well-known in the English-speaking world, but then again how much do you know about the creative world of, say, Poland, Cambodia, or Argentina?
The same 'working too much' thing propagates to adult lives as well, not just studies. They work longer hours than pretty much anyone else and have fewer holidays; they are usually much more serious about their family planning and whatnot than Western people. It's a stressful environment to live in, no doubt, but you can't deny there are positive sides to it, too. To claim that it's just their education system that is terrible and needs to be changed is extremely short-sighted and doesn't take the entire picture into account.
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EPT
