[The Editors' Verdict]Private Education Thrives on Fear

On February 2, 1989, just days before the Lunar New Year holiday, Jeong Won-sik, the Minister of Culture and Education, abruptly announced a "plan to ease the ban on private tutoring." The key points were allowing students to attend academies during vacations and permitting university students to provide private tutoring. Although there were conditions such as banning academy instructors from tutoring outside the academy and prohibiting professional or vocational tutoring, this was a measure to lift the ban on private tutoring that had been fully enforced during the Fifth Republic.

The allowance of private tutoring was a godsend for university students at the time. They could cover living expenses and even tuition fees through tutoring. However, since then, South Korea's private education market has expanded rapidly, fueled by parents' intense educational zeal that would rival anywhere in the world. According to Statistics Korea, last year the total private education expenditure in South Korea was 26 trillion won, a 36% increase compared to 19 trillion won in 2012, ten years earlier. While the number of students is decreasing, the amount of money parents pour into private education is skyrocketing.

"The fear born from the lack of information in public education." This is the reason for the private education craze mentioned by Mr. A, who runs a college entrance consulting academy in the Seoul metropolitan area. He previously served as a vice-principal at a high school but left the school just before retirement, feeling the limitations of proper college guidance. He asserts that current private education thrives on the fear of parents and students. "When students go to academies, they are given problems they simply cannot solve under the pretext of assessing their academic ability. Faced with poor grades, parents and students become frustrated and rely entirely on the academy."

The college entrance consulting market, which has grown alongside famous academy districts like Gangnam and Mok-dong, is no different. Many parents who visit well-known consulting firms with their children's report cards feel disheartened by the results presented by these firms. The so-called "90% acceptance rate" is actually a "safe bet," recommending schools and departments much lower than the student's actual grades. Parents feel deceived but still pay millions of won in consultation fees.

However, it is not fair to blame parents and students. Except for some specialized high schools and autonomous private high schools, school education has long lost the ability to provide the quality education and information students need. Parents feel it is unsafe to entrust their children's college entrance solely to public education.

The Yoon Seok-yeol administration has launched a full-scale drive for educational reform. The immediate plan is to eliminate killer questions on the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) that cannot be solved through the normal curriculum. Large entrance exam academies and so-called popular "star instructors" are also targeted. It is a declaration of war against private education.

Is the artificial abolition of private education truly the answer to normalizing education? Unfortunately, no. Unless more fundamental problems are solved beyond just cracking down on private education, it will be futile. As long as there is no confidence that sufficient education and information can be obtained within schools without having to send children to famous academies or seek out reputed entrance consulting firms, the war against private education is meaningless. It is already a losing battle before it even begins.

Public education itself must prove that it is equal to or superior to private education. The focus should be on strengthening the competitiveness of public education, not on eliminating killer questions or attacking famous academies and star instructors. Without the normalization of public education, no matter how loudly "abolish private education" is shouted, the lights in the Daechi-dong academy district will never go out.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.