The article says that at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist), they were beginning finals at the end of May. Prior to finals, four students and one professor committed suicide. The Kaist student council issued a statement on April 7th, "'Day after day we are cornered into an unrelenting competition that smothers and suffocates us," the council said. 'We couldn’t even spare 30 minutes for our troubled classmates because of all our homework. We no longer have the ability to laugh freely.'"
Wow. That's some pretty intense stuff. I've heard tales of how stressful the Korean academic life is, and I've seen some of it firsthand. However, the part of the article that horrified me the most was this:
"Young people in South Korea are a chronically unhappy group. A recent survey found them to be — for the third year in a row — the unhappiest subset among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Education Ministry in Seoul said 146 students committed suicide last year, including 53 in junior high and 3 in elementary school."
Three in elementary school. Elementary school! 13 years old or less, and they felt they had to commit suicide to escape the pressure. That is so saddening I can barely comment.
This past weekend a friend of mine in Buyeo had a friend come visit from Seoul. She works at a private academy there teaching mostly preschoolers. Her school caters mostly to Koreans who have lived in English-speaking countries, and she says her preschoolers are basically fluent in English. Not only that, but they are reading at an American third grade level. THIRD GRADE. PRESCHOOLERS. In a second language. I only went to preschool for like a week or something, but I'm pretty sure I recall it being a lot of playing house and coloring. Her classes do book reports! Again, I don't know if I can stress this clearly enough: preschool. Also please remember, Koreans are a year younger than Westerners (they count being in the womb as one year, so you're born one year old), so my sixth graders are 13 Korean age, but 12 Western, which means a Korean 4 year old is actually 3 years old in America. They have homework! This is not a joke.
I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned how most of my students go to hagwons (private academies) after school. My sixth graders will be taking their middle school exams in July, so their homeroom teacher has set up extra studying time after school. I leave at 5 o'clock; so do a lot of my students. I'm pretty sure when I was in elementary school I would NEVER be in school that late unless it was for some kind of sports practice or something. This kind of makes me think back to high school swimming. It's one of the few sports I know of that has regular morning and afternoon practice, and I don't really know why other than the fact that everyone does it like that, so if you don't, you can't be competitive. I wonder if this is how the Korean obsession with studying got started - in order to compete, you have to keep up with your peers.
This makes me even sadder for my students. It's so disheartening to know that where they live has already determined in the insanely competitive world of Korean academics that they have started behind and fall behind all the time. How can my kids, who start English in third grade (maybe one 40 minute class a week in K, 1, and 2 if they're lucky) compete with preschoolers in Seoul doing book reports that an American first grader couldn't do? I've seen all their scores for all their other subjects as well, and it's sad. This is not to blame anyone, not the teachers or the principal or anyone, I can just see how people that live in cities and have money have a serious leg up already. The article I posted said that the new president of Kaist used to teach at M.I.T, and he instituted new policies to make Kaist more like other prestigious science colleges. This means he said all classes will be taught in English! Also, the students attend mostly for free, but now those whose grades drop by a hundredth will be penalized by extra tuition. The article says that some cite these policies as reasons for the suicides, and so under serious pressure, the president has relented and changed them.
Even out here in the country though, don't let me fool you, the pressure cooker is here in full force as well. A friend of mine at a small school similar to mine told me one of her boys came into the classroom sobbing. He got a 95/100 on his English test, and his parents told him "they had no use for a son who gets a 95, they only want a son who gets 100..." My coteacher and I recently tested the students and after she graded their tests, she read the scores out loud to the classes, much to my surprised dismay. Everyone knows everyone's business, and anyone who does poorly is ridiculed as an "idiot" by their peers. The students will tell me to skip certain students when I'm asking questions because "He no English, Teacher!" or they'll just make a big "X" with their arms.
Don't get me wrong though. Korean parents love their children just like Western parents, and Korean teachers and students are so much like us. It's just pretty crazy to me how much pressure they are under all the time.
