The Birth of Korean Cool (5 page)

Confucianism didn’t really get into full swing in Korea until its second wave—called neo-Confucianism—in the fourteenth century
AD
.

The rulers adopted neo-Confucianism partly as an excuse to overthrow the old aristocracy (with whom they were fed up). Under this new system, anyone could become an aristocrat. All they had to
do was pass an excruciating civil service exam, called the
kwako
.
³

In other words, the Korean political system was a meritocratic aristocracy—what an incredible oxymoron. A man from all but the very lowest classes had the right to sit for the
kwako
(originally instituted in the tenth century). Not only was it really hard, but it was also administered only once every three years. In a given exam year, only a hundred or so people
would pass, out of thousands of applicants.

If you passed it, you were instantly given the title of
yangban
—you became an aristocrat. Not only that, but your whole family line was upgraded in the process. There’s a
catch, though. A big one. Your male heirs have to pass the
kwako
exam as well. If your descendants failed the exam three generations in a row, you and your family were stripped of the
yangban
title and went back to being nobodies. Does this not sound like something out of Grimms’ fairy tales?

Ever since then, Korean students have been studying as if their lives, their family’s lives, and the future lives of their entire bloodline depended on it. The
yangban
system
technically disappeared at the end of the nineteenth century, but apparently, one hundred years is not long enough to shake off tradition. Confucianism in Korea is at the weakest point it’s
ever been, but it still has not completely released its hold on the education system.

How much has teacher worship changed in recent decades—between my school days and the present day? I can think of many examples of teachers abusing the power that society unquestioningly
bestowed on them. But the government education officials I met seemed to think quite a lot had changed. They were proud of the abolition of corporal punishment, for example. And they said they had
made significant strides in reducing the importance of rote memorization in favor of creativity.

They were obviously depressed, however, about the erosion of respect for teachers. Lee Dong-ho, the NIIED director, told me, “Compared to the past, students’ parents are just as
educated as the teacher, so there is a lot of friction between teachers and parents about the students.”

The reason why Korean schoolteachers don’t command as much respect as before is that for the last decade, Korean students have given their attention to private after-school learning
centers, called
hakwons
. It’s an open secret that students pay less attention to their public schoolteachers now because their
hakwon
studies have put them way, way ahead of
the syllabus.

PRIVATE TUTORING: THE KOREAN VICE

Private tutoring was illegal when I lived in Korea, punishable by fines for both the tutor and the family engaging them. Sometimes students would be caught because their
fellow students ratted them out. When I was in the seventh grade, we had to fill out a questionnaire exposing our classmates. Questions included “Who is receiving private tutoring?”
“Who is smoking?” and “Who is engaging in sexual intercourse?” My teacher told us we were obligated to write down names for every single question, whether we knew any guilty
parties or not. If we left the questions blank, our own names would be inserted, he threatened.

The government viewed private lessons as a dangerous threat to the level playing field, as wealthy families would have a major advantage in getting their kids into top universities. The ban on
private tutoring was officially lifted in the late 1990s, largely because it was impossible to enforce.

The legalization of private tutoring has proved a disaster. Korean parents throw money fanatically at
hakwons
. A family will typically pay anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000 per month per
child for these extra after-school lessons. According to Kim Young-sun, 2.8 percent of the Korean GDP is spent on
hakwons
. To give a sense of how huge 2.8 percent is, that’s over
half of what Korea spends on its entire public K–12 education system.
⁴

Some
hakwons
specialize in prepping students for the SAT exam required by U.S. universities. According to Sid Kim, who owns Wise Education, a respected and successful
hakwon
,
some SAT summer prep courses offered by “ultra-elite”
hakwons
with “star teachers” charge $20,000. Just for the summer. Just for the SATs.

According a 2012 report on education issued by the Pearson publishing group, “The [Korean] government has become so worried about the extent of these studies that it has banned
hagwons
from being open after 10pm, but still needs to send out patrols to shut down those which mask illegal, after-hour teaching by posing as self-study libraries.”
⁵

In other words, there are study-easies. Like speakeasies, but for studyholics.

Hakwons
disrupt one of the best aspects of Korean education: its meritocracy. “In Korea you can gain upward social mobility through public school education,” Lee Dong-ho
said. And this is why private tutoring really poses a problem: it favors families with money.

Another problem: there’s something in the air at
hakwons
that gives rise to a surreal level of cheating and corruption. “In some ways, the shadiest business in Korea is the
education business,” says Sid Kim.

Case in point: In May 2013, the U.S. College Board canceled an SAT exam scheduled in Korea. It was the first time in the entire history of the College Board that it had canceled an exam for an
entire country. The reason: mass cheating.

The cheating had occurred at over a dozen of Korea’s
hakwons
. The
hakwon
teachers had illegally opened the tests the day before the exam and released the questions to the
students.

According to Sid Kim, “The going rate for buying SAT answers is $10,000.” To make the transaction look halfway legit, said Kim, the
hakwons
would claim they were offering
“special private SAT sessions” for $1,000 an hour, for a minimum of ten hours. During these sessions the
hakwon
teacher would go over “sample” questions, which were
in fact the actual questions for the real SAT exam.

Kim’s
hakwon
was not implicated. In fact, he had already closed the SAT prep part of his business because he was being barraged by parents constantly and openly trying to bribe
him for the SAT test answers. Kim, who has a PhD in education, has decided to close Wise Education for good, despite its profitability. “I’m leaving the business at the end of the year.
Believe me, I love education, I’ve been doing it for eighteen years. I love working with kids. But I hate dealing with the Korean parents because they’re shady.”

Kim wasn’t surprised by the SAT scandal at all. He said, “It’s very simple economics.
Hakwons
make a ton of money [from selling answers], so ethics go by the
wayside.

“I’d like to think I was one of the ones who tried to do it the right way,” he added, “based on pedagogy and education, based on what’s good for the student.
I’ve pushed my way of doing things on the parents, but it’s very difficult to convince them.”

Kim believes the reason for Koreans’ obsession with exam performance is based on Korea’s ancient tradition of civil service exams. Today’s Korean university exams have a much
higher pass rate than the
kwako
exams of yore, but the stakes and stress level are still very high. Said Kim, “It’s hard to change a mentality that has been going on for
thousands of years.”

University entrance anxiety is regarded as one of the reasons that Korea has the highest suicide rate of any nation in the industrialized world. In fact, the most common cause of death for
Koreans under the age of forty is suicide; for most other OECD nations, the leading cause is auto accidents or heart attack. Hanging is the most popular method, constituting 44.9 percent of all
suicides; poison comes in at a close second.
⁶

I would have guessed that jumping off buildings was the most popular method. At least, that’s how we used to imagine our suicides when I was a student. We all thought about it. We all
talked about it. One of my best childhood friends confessed to me, decades later, that she once stood atop her building and seriously contemplated jumping. Happily, she didn’t go through with
it.

When this suicide phenomenon comes up in conversation, people invariably ask me whether this is because suicide was considered a noble way of dealing with shame. No, it’s not. You’re
thinking of medieval Japan.

Among the people I knew, academic pressure was the main reason for suicidal thoughts. When I was in school, the odds of university entrance  were slim. In fact, you could only apply to one
major university at a time, per year. If you failed the exam, you could take it the following year. But if you were a boy, you could only sit for the exam for up to three consecutive years before
you had to enlist in the army. (If you were admitted to a university successfully, you could defer conscription until after you got your degree.)

By the time a man was done with his approximately two-year army stint, there was no way that he could have retained enough information ever to sit for the exam again. His life was finished.

According to Lee Dong-ho, as of 2008, Korea has been trying to implement a university admissions system “more similar to that of the United States, including volunteer work, hobbies, or
activities in the application to show all their skills.” But the plan has backfired: “This has the side effect of pressuring students to improve in [extracurriculars] in addition to
test scores,” says Kim Young-sun.

It’s clearly not the teachers’ or the government’s fault. The students’ and parents’ obsession with competition borders on mental illness. In fact, according to the
NIIED staff, the studying addiction has its own name in Korea: “study fever.” Kim Young-sun sees this as a problem for Korea’s future. “We have to keep up with the demands
for creativity. When people are so focused on college, it’s a loss of human resources. Korea loses its competitive advantage.” I think it’s very telling that even in the context
of encouraging creativity, Kim still frames it in terms of Korea’s national competitive edge.

Kim added that the ministry is also trying to de-emphasize rote memorization and the overly heavy importance placed on mathematics studies. While I would certainly not object to any education
reforms that might lower the high Korean youth suicide rate, I think changes that threaten math and rote memorization are unfortunate. These are the aspects of my Korean education that I value
most.

SCARY MATH

South Korean students have almost invariably ranked number one in the world in terms of math aptitude, according to studies from multiple sources.
⁷
Imagine what it was like for me to enter this environment after being at a U.S. public school my whole life. In the Korean sixth grade, they were already studying advanced
number theory. I was at a huge disadvantage: I was one of the few students in my class who couldn’t add long columns of sums in their head.

I discovered this one day when my sixth-grade teacher, Hong
sun-seng
(no relation), suddenly started reading a series of numbers between two and four digits in length. I didn’t
know if he was reading phone numbers, or the Enigma code, or what. The students sat and listened intently until Hong
sun-seng
said, “. . . equals what?”

More than half the students answered with the correct sum of all those numbers.
They had done the sums in their heads.
No one had written anything down; he was calling out the numbers
too quickly for that to have been feasible.

Was I watching a magic show?

As it turned out, the trendy after-school activity in those days was to go to a private learning academy for lessons in
amsan
—memory honing. This was one of the few types of
hakwon
that were legal in those days—because it taught content that was not directly related to any school subject.

The
amsan
academies are where students learned to do mental arithmetic. A small handful could do long columns of multiplication in their head as well. Apparently the trick (if you can
call it that) is to first teach a student to be highly proficient in the use of the abacus. Then, whenever the instructor calls out numbers, you’re supposed to envision the abacus beads
flying around, and by seeing in your mind’s eye the final position of the abacus beads, you are able to convert it to regular numbers, and you have your answer. Most complicated shortcut
ever.

Private learning academies also pushed concentration exercises, with freaky consequences. A family friend had a daughter of about six, named Sujin. She had been attending a special
“concentration academy.” One night when our two families were dining at a Seoul restaurant, Sujin’s parents asked her to do a demonstration: by focusing all her mental energy (or
something), she was able to slice through a pair of wooden chopsticks with a business card. Without denting the card. My sisters and I could not believe our eyes, so Sujin did it again and
again.

One aspect of Korean school I did appreciate is that girls studied as much as boys. They didn’t have this hang-up that American girls have that boys won’t like them if they show
talent in math and science. Korean guys are not especially attracted to girls who are bad at math and science.

THE ASH EATERS

My parents knew students when they were in school who learned English by memorizing one page of a dictionary each day. After they’d fully committed it to memory,
they’d burn it and eat the ashes. This wasn’t because they really thought the words would stay in their body if they ate the pages. Burning a page is a ritual sacrifice symbolizing what
you have to forego—time, your short-term happiness—in order to achieve something more important. Such practices are very infrequent and largely anecdotal—everyone knows someone
who knows someone who has done it. But the legend has staying power because it symbolizes the real suffering and masochism involved in assimilating huge amounts of information.