It has been praised by President Barack Obama and delivered top-five results for South Korea in global literacy and numeracy tests, but among Koreans themselves, the education system is so controversial that hundreds of thousands become educational emigrants.

 he regimented by-the-book teaching system leaves nothing to chance.
“I have a friend in the US who is a swimming instructor and she guides her students to learn the best personalized swimming techniques for themselves, but this takes a long time to develop,” said Kim Won-sook, headmistress of central Seoul’s Jangwon Middle School. “In Korea, educators teach everything: The methods, the techniques - even how to practice.”

 Teaching is egalitarian, but by favoring the average student, she added, does not cater well to slow or advanced learners.
“Korean education cannot produce geniuses,” added Sue Kim, an educational reporter at Korea’s leading daily, The Chosun Ilbo. “We don’t have any Nobel laureates, but we can produce a lot of Samsung mid-level managers.”

 The system is highly focused on examination results.
The modern equivalent of the old state-run Confucian exams is the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Test, or KSAT, which streams students for universities. In a society burdened with nepotism, cronyism and corruption, it is one of the few areas of Korean society that is scrupulously fair.

 But intense focus on exam scores creates an irony: knowledge is often eschewed in favor of test preparation. “I have a nephew who is very literate but his mother says, “I don’t want him to read, as he won’t pass his tests,’” said Emanuel Pastreich, a Harvard professor of Asian Studies teaching at Seoul’s Kyunghee University. “In Korea you have to know the right answer to every question, but in the US or Europe, the process of getting to the answer is much more important,” added education journalist Kim.

 Likewise, Koreans often consider skill less important than qualification. A Japanese chef working in Seoul noted that after graduating from a cooking institute in Italy, he decided to gain real experience working in Italian kitchens. Meanwhile, his Korean counterparts at the institute, having gained their certificates, flew home and opened restaurants.
Egalitarian school teaching, combined with pressure to ace exams and enter prestige universities, has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of cram schools that offer children a chance to get ahead; Kim the reporter noted that when her daughter entered elementary school, every single new student could already read.

 “Parents prepare their children before school, so what is happening is that everyone in the classroom is equally prepared,” she said. “They are equally far advanced of the curriculum - and that is happening at every level.”

 Hakwon are as notable in Korean towns as pubs are in British, but British children might quail at the hours their Korean counterparts spend in them: Teens commonly leave school and attend hakwon until midnight.

 “Kids sleep in school and stay up for the hakwons,” said Pastreich.
Scholastic pressures are so great that suicide is the number-one killer of South Koreans under 40 (compared to traffic accidents in other developed nations), while educational cost burdens are so colossal, they are cited as a factor in the declining national birth rate.