单选题 South Korea"s hagwon (private tutoring academies) crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country"s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.
But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades—and often nothing else—have long been prized as essential for professional success. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore" Education Minister was asked last year about his nation"s reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We"re not as bad as the Koreans."
In Seoul, large numbers of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. At the prestigious Daesung Institute, admission is based on students" test scores. Only 14% of applicants are accepted. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nation"s top three universities.
From a distance, South Korea"s results look enviable. Its students consistently outperform their counterparts in almost every country in reading and math. In the U.S., Barack Obama and his Education Secretary speak glowingly of the enthusiasm South Korean parents have for educating their children, and they lament how far the U.S. students are falling behind. Without its education obsession, South Korea could not have been transformed into the economic powerhouse that it is today. But the country"s leaders worry that unless its rigid, hierarchical system starts to nurture more innovation, economic growth will stall—and fertility rates will continue to decline as families feel the pressure of paying for all that tutoring. "You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system." Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, "but Koreans are not happy with it."