Shortly before 10 p.m, BMWs and school buses line the streets of Daechi-dong, a neighbourhood in the stylish district of Gangnam in Seoul. Soon, secondary-school pupils will spill out of its hagwon, or private cram schools; around 1,000 of these night schools are packed into the area, including the most prestigious in the city. After five hours of English, maths or science tuitions following a full day at school, the teens will be whisked home — to more study, past midnight.
Such is the ordeal of education in South Korea. From a tender age, all pupils (and their parents) are fixated on the eight-hour multiple-choice entrance exam for university, to which three-quarters of school-leavers go. Because competition is fierce, parents plough money into private tuition — over 18 trillion won (Rs.102 lakh crore) last year, or more than a tenth of household spending — to improve their children’s chances of admission into the best secondary schools.
This has led to intense competition even for places in crammers. The most desirable hagwon set their own entrance exams and refuse applicants with low scores. Some of the rejected reapply several times. Hence a new breed of cram schools has emerged that mostly coach students to get into more illustrious ones. They are called sekki (“cub”) hagwon.
They do not advertise (and indeed resent the sekki label). Nor do parents admit to sending their children to them, says Kim Hyun-jung, who runs DSchool, an online forum where parents share tips on private schooling in Daechi-dong (it gets 10,000 views daily). Going to a sekki hagwon is “a bit embarrassing”, she says.
Even after a student gains entry into an elite hagwon, the sekki sort can remain useful. Crammers often use textbooks that their pupils would not begin studying at day schools until up to five years later. So some students go to a sekki hagwon for two nights a week simply to keep up with classes in their main hagwon (where they are streamed by ability and tested frequently).
The government has tried to level the playing field by banning hagwon from teaching after 10 p.m and requiring them to tell the government how much they charge. Last year, hagwon were prohibited from advertising that they teach ahead of the school curriculum. Yet enforcement is lax. Like many other bright students, Choi Ye-eun, a 13-year-old studying maths for 17-year-olds, says that she does much of her hagwon homework during school hours.