I was going to do this one as a straight cross-post from Roboseyo, but then, by a crazy random happenstance, while I was bopping around Gwanghwamun this morning, I stumbled upon this demonstration regarding the very topic I meant to discuss:
my korean's not good enough to translate the signs...a little help?
The big sign says, "We want to live"
Each demonstrator had a sign on his/her back, describing one of the social costs of the High School Exam
According to a fellow I chatted with, one of the students demonstrating here was actually a high school senior, skipping the exam as a form of protest.
See, today is the day of the Korean College Entrance Exam, or 수학 능력 시험, also known as The Manifestation Of Everything That’s Wrong With The Korean Education System.
Last night, I went downtown to see Girlfriendoseyo, and we had a very pleasant night. However, on the way through the winding alleys of Samchungong, we passed the entrance to a high school, and saw a cluster of underclasspersons sitting together, wrapped up in blankets.
You see, every year, High School Seniors take the High School Entrance exam, basically the most important test of their lives. Their score on this exam determines what University they can enter, and which university they attend, in this credential-obssessed society, basically determines your employability for life.
For example, despite all the efforts of the Education ministry to reduce the dominance of the three top universities in Korea (SKY: Seoul National, Korea, Yonsei Universities), 80% of the judges appointed between 2003 and 2008 were SKY graduates: a veritable stranglehold. You would find similar unbalances in most other sectors where power, money, and influence concentrate.
Because of the importance of the exam, students NOT in their senior year gather at the entrances of their high schools to cheer on their seniors, as they enter the school.
Today, roads will be blocked off to eliminate traffic noise around test sites. Airports will even re-arrange flight approach paths, so that an airplanes’ drone does not distract students in their seats, during the exam. Police wait by subway stations to speedily escort late students from the subway exit to their exam site, to help them arrive on time. High school seniors have been living on four hours of sleep a night for the months leading up to today; some parents even rent their kids a room in a goshiwon — a cheap hotel — so that they can study without distraction from their brothers and sisters, or from the TV or internet.
SeoulGlow made this video, interviewing students waiting outside a university’s gates, a few years ago.
The dark side of the hope and expectations tied up in this one exam (and it’s big: I’ve asked adults in their 30s, “What would you change about your past, if you had a magic wand?” and one of the most common answers was “I’d study harder in my last year of high school, to get into a better school: eighteen years later, people are STILL looking back at THIS test, as the turning point of their lives), is the depression and despair that comes with the fear of failure.
This article, “On a College Entrance Exam Deathwatch,” suggests that probably 200 (mostly teen) suicides a year in Korea are directly connected with anxiety over this test. The stories the writer tells are sometimes shocking.
This is a story about students protesting the exam: they wore masks to hide their identities, because they were afraid they’d be put on some university admissions blacklist if their identities were known. They’re just that afraid of not being able to get into a good school. A Korean Teachers’ Union actually told their students to cheat as a way of protesting the exam. . . and were rightly called by Brian from Jeollanamdo for putting their students’ careers on the line, rather than putting their OWN careers on the line, if they believed so strongly in their cause.
The exam is mostly multiple choice…and soul-killing, and emblematic of a lot of the things I criticize about Korea’s culture (I even wrote about it on my “Five Things I’d Change About Korea” post. . . )
So if you know any Korean kids writing the exam, say a prayer today (their moms have been praying eight hours a day for a month now; you can at least spare one or two), and hope that this year, more students choose to skip suicide, and instead do that other awful thing underperforming students do, and put their entire lives on hold in order to study for ANOTHER year after graduating high school, just to get a better score and get into a better school.
The public school teacher exam was on Sunday, too, so a lot of people’s futures are hanging on the results of this week’s tests.
(the number of years lost to studying by Koreans taking these once-a-year-exams, including the civil service exam, the bar exam, the public school-teacher exam, and the high school exam, and the number of person-years of lost productivity, as well as the drain on the finances of the parents of these study-monkeys, ought to be calculated, in order for their impact/drag on Korea’s economy to be quantified…I’d bet the only thing holding Korea’s economy back MORE than all these years of work lost, from some of Korea’s brightest people, is the gender empowerment gap.)
13/11/2008 at 4:27 pm Permalink
Rob,
Can we recap how and why this exam process got started. I would think it stems from a country coming out of ruins.
As expats we can look at every aspect of Korean life and see where it needs improvement. Sometimes it is hard for me to express my own pity for these issues, because I try so hard to keep myself objective. I try to tell myself “It is Korea” and that I didn’t come here to reform the country, I came to see and observe.
But I know firsthand the affects of such a system as I watch my boyfriend struggle to get a job.
I think like America change will only come once the younger generation grows into the old generation, and the old people who grew up during the 40′s – 60′s die off.
Could we not consider how amazing it is that expats do live here and somehow survive and adapt to the social systems that exist here?
I don’t know about every expat, but I bow and make sure I am respectful to the elders. I try not to make a scene in public. It seems I don’t do this by choice but as part of assimilation.
Underneath though it is all alien to me, and in my own space of my home can I feel “normal”.
…
Anyways, knowing that the exams cause great depression which leads to suicide it then points to the lack of psychological support in this country…again the conservative social system.
Sometimes…. ignorance is bliss.
13/11/2008 at 4:57 pm Permalink
Joy: I don’t have the links on hand, and can’t remember if they came from The Grand Narrative, Scribblings Of The Metropolitician, or both, bit I’m fairly sure the test-oriented traits (as well as the corporal punishment jones) in the Korean education system are actually legacies of the way the Japanese organized Korea’s education system and philosophy during the colonial period.
As Japanese colonial legacies go, I wish Korea would stop tearing down beautiful old buildings built by Japanese, and tear down and reform/rebuild the ugly educational institution instead.
13/11/2008 at 5:05 pm Permalink
Actually, the Korean system sounds a lot like the one in practice in England, at least in structural terms (take a test and if you do well you move on to University, and if you don’t do well you get “tracked” into vocational labor).
No doubt Korea has an ungodly suicide rate for young people, and the extreme pressure parents put on their kids can be pretty insane. But just to play a little Devil’s Advocate, kids face this sort of pressure to achieve almost everywhere in the modern world. And unfortunately, suicide (or more often self-destructive behavior) happens in America as well. I taught at a private high school in the States for a while, and while perhaps less intense, the insane expectation game played by parents, using their kids as pawns, was pretty much the same. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (throw in Stanford if you like) are considered to be the gold-standard, and if your kid isn’t good enough to get into one of these places, let’s start assigning blame to her teachers and her school (actually, I’d imagine Korean parents probably just blame the kid and themselves, which is hardly an improvement).
I enjoyed reading your piece Rob. I just think there’s an opportunity to acknowledge that the American system isn’t all that different, in terms of set-up or consequences. The American SAT is a ridiculous test that has far too much weight placed on it, even today, and it’s a scam to boot. (Huge moneymaker for Educational Testing Services, who have their greasy mitts all over the GRE, LSAT, and GMAT as well. When I had to send GRE scores out to various programs for graduate school, I remember paying something like 40 bucks a pop, just for them to seal and mail my freakin’ scores. And this was in the ’90′s.)
13/11/2008 at 7:35 pm Permalink
Rob~ Definitely Korea’s relationship and attitude towards Japan is an interesting aspect of this all.
Hmm if people understood that Japan’s part in Korea is an aspect of their history that could be used for tourism, perhaps they would move to preserve buildings.
Sigh~ anyways…
14/11/2008 at 11:02 am Permalink
The first photo is an organization of journalists who are against “educational competition” and are calling for the exams to be abolished.
20/01/2009 at 3:13 pm Permalink
I am very interested in your story, I am currently doing the planning work for a documentary based on the Korean education system, and looking at links between a very high teenage suicide rate and depression within Korea.
I would be interested to discuss this subject with you, also if you have any other contacts that would be interested in speaking to me, please pass on my details.
Many thanks for an interesting article.
20/01/2009 at 4:51 pm Permalink
Hi, Martyn. Thanks for your comment.
I highly, highly recommend you write me an e-mail, at roboseyo[at]gmail[dot]com
And I also recommend you contact Mike Hurt, the other administrator of this blog, by clicking the “contact us” button on the top right side of this page, who has worked in Korean high schools, whereas I have not, and who has also blogged extensively about this topic.