The Smartest Kids in the World (24 page)

At Lee’s hagwons, about one in five applicants made it to the in-person interview. There, she asked the candidates to teach two mock lessons while she watched,
something U.S. teachers were rarely asked to do before being hired. That way, she could get a sense of whether they would be able to teach. It was a radically logical hiring strategy.

Once teachers got hired, Lee tracked their performance. If student test scores or enrollment figures dropped for a particular teacher, she put that teacher on probation. If the numbers remained low after six months, she let the teacher go. Each year, she fired about 10 percent of her instructors. (By comparison,
U.S. schools dismissed about 2 percent of teachers annually for poor performance.)

In Lee’s opinion, this flexibility made all the difference. She could undo hiring mistakes and motivate the rest of her teachers to work hard. Normal public-school teachers, by contrast, lacked such incentives, she said, which made them less effective and drove parental demand for hagwons. “Without hagwons, Korea would nosedive on PISA.”

When Eric’s friend Jenny had moved back to Korea from the United States, she’d enrolled in a hagwon, like all her friends in eighth grade.
There, she’d repeated virtually everything she was supposedly learning in school during the day: Korean, math, science, and social studies. On most nights, she’d stayed at the hagwon until ten; before tests, she’d stayed until midnight.

Jenny said she’d learned more at her hagwon than she did at school. When I asked her why, she had a simple explanation: “I think they’re better because they teach more effectively.”

Most Korean teenagers preferred their hagwon instructors to their normal teachers. In a survey of 6,600 students at 116 high schools, Korean students gave their hagwon teachers higher scores across the board: hagwon teachers were better prepared, more devoted to teaching, and more respectful of students’ opinions, they said. The hagwon teachers did best of all, students said, when it came to treating all students fairly, regardless of their academic performance.

The free-market incentives seemed to be working, at least in the opinion of the students. Teachers treated students more like customers. Was Korea proof that the burgeoning American charter-school market could work? Competition had clearly led to profits and customer-friendly practices. But did kids actually learn more in hagwons?

It was very hard to isolate what was causing Korea’s PISA scores; were the regular public schools helping kids do well or the hagwons
?
Statistically speaking,
private tutoring did seem to lead to higher test scores, especially in math, but the benefit diminished for reading as students got older.
PISA data for the entire world suggested that the quality of afterschool lessons mattered more than the quantity. Outside North America and Europe, private tutoring was pervasive and, on every continent, the quality varied—a lot.

As in many free markets, price was loosely related to quality. And that was the problem.

There was a hierarchy in tutoring. Jenny’s most affluent classmates went to expensive private tutors for one-on-one help. That was considered the premium service. Jenny went to a large hagwon
chain called Highest, along with some of her classmates. These outfits offered tutoring for the masses. They weren’t cheap, but even many poor Korean parents scraped together the money for the fees. Then there were some kids whose parents could not afford either option; they studied on their own or in after-hours programs at their schools.
Eight out of ten Korean parents said they felt financial pressure from hagwon tuition costs. Still, they kept paying the fees,
convinced that the more they paid, the more their children learned.

That inequity nagged at Andrew Kim. Even though this system had made him a millionaire, he didn’t see it as a model for anyone. “I don’t think this is the ideal way,” he said. “This leads to a vicious cycle of poor families passing on poverty to their children.”

He, too, thought the demand for hagwons reflected a failure of normal public schools—a popular belief that was hard to prove or disprove. Clearly, parents believed the schools were inadequate, but it was hard to know if they were right. In any case, just like Korea’s minister of education, Kim believed that Finland was a much better model for the world.

In the meantime, he was making a lot of money from the vicious cycle, and he planned to continue until 2017, when his contract with Megastudy expired. After that, he wanted to give back to society, he said, maybe by helping train public-school teachers. He had a six-year-old son and didn’t want him to grow up inside a pressure cooker.

I didn’t meet anyone in Korea who praised the education system, not even people who were getting rich off it. The lesson seemed to be that without
equity
—meaningful opportunities for everyone, not just the elite—the system would be gamed and distorted. Parental anxieties would lead to an education arms race. The rewards for an education had gotten too great and too rare in Korea, based on metrics that were too rigid. Every year, Korean newspapers ran stories about cheating
scandals involving hagwon instructors, students, and sometimes parents. In 2007,
some 900 Korean students had their SAT scores canceled because of leaked test questions.

For decades, the Korean government had been trying to tame the country’s culture of educational masochism. Politicians had cajoled and threatened, even going so far as to ban hagwons altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under a dictatorship. Each time, though, the hagwons came back stronger. After the government capped hagwon tuition fees, about half of hagwons flouted the rules,
charging double and sometimes quintuple the allowable rates.

Nothing worked because the most powerful incentives remained the same. Korean kids gorged themselves on studying because they wanted to get into one of the country’s top universities. And who could blame them? In 2007,
nine out of ten Supreme Court and high court justices were alumni of Seoul National University, one of the top three. Four out of ten CEOs of major Korean companies came from the same place.

To change those incentives, Korean employers needed to change, not just Korean schools. The raw meritocracy that ruled the lives of children did not, it seemed, extend to the lives of adults.

It was impossible to say for sure, but that hierarchy may have helped explain the suicide rate in Korea, which followed an unexpected pattern. Despite all that studying, Korean teenagers did not have a high suicide rate. In fact,
Korea’s suicide rate for fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds was lower than that of Finland, Poland, and the United States, along with at least fourteen other countries. However, Korean adults
did
commit suicide at a very high rate
.
Korea’s overall suicide rate was one of the highest in the world. The reasons behind a country’s suicide rate were mysterious and complex, but it did seem that the worst choke points in the Korean system were in the workplaces and universities of adults, not just the classrooms of children.

Until the rest of society changed, Korean politicians would keep launching quixotic attacks against the twenty-four-hour study culture.
It was like an endless game of Red Rover in which government bureaucrats repeatedly charged a wall of Korean mothers and fathers ten times as strong.

When I arrived in Korea, the government’s latest maneuver was to enforce a curfew on hagwons, raiding the cram schools in the middle of the night and sending children home to bed. It was impossible to imagine government enforcers winning this round of Red Rover, but I wanted to see them come over.

On a rainy Wednesday evening in June, Seoul’s late-night study squad gathered for a patrol. The preparations for the raid were subdued. We had tea and rice crackers in a fluorescent-lit conference room, surrounded by government cubicles.

The squad leader was Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul’s Gangnam district office of education. He had small oval glasses and wore a pinstriped blazer over a yellow and white shirt.

At about ten-twenty, Cha smoked a cigarette in the parking lot. “We don’t leave at ten sharp,” he explained, as thunder rolled across the sky. “We want to give them twenty minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses.”

Hagwons caught operating after ten got three warnings. Then they had to shut down for a week. If the violation happened after midnight, the hagwon had to close immediately for two weeks. To find violators, the government had begun paying citizen tipsters. One Korean informer had reportedly earned a quarter of a million dollars just by
ratting out various hagwons. Meanwhile, always quick to sense an opportunity, hagwon entrepreneurs were offering new classes on how citizens could find and report hagwon violations. On and on went the cycle of punishment and profit. So far, the government had paid out $3 million in bounties.

Finally, we piled into a silver Kia Sorento and head into
Daechi-dong, one of Seoul’s busiest hagwon districts. The streets were clogged with hundreds of parents picking up their children from all the hagwons that had closed in time for the curfew. The six inspectors walked along the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons were located, looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.

Around eleven, they headed toward an establishment they’d gotten calls about in the past. They climbed the dingy stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit’s only female member knocked on the door. “Hello? Hello!” she called. A muted voice called from within: “Just a minute!”

The inspectors glanced at each other. Cha signaled to one of his colleagues to go back downstairs and block the elevator.

A moment later, a stooped, older man opened the door. He had a worried look on his face, but he let the inspectors in. They took off their shoes and walked briskly through the place.

The establishment was an after-hours self-study library, not technically a hagwon. In a den of rooms with low ceilings and fluorescent lights, about forty teenagers sat at small carrels, hard at work. When we walked through, they looked up, only half-interested, with a slightly glazed look in their eyes. The place felt claustrophobic, like a postmodern sweatshop, one that mass produced knowledge instead of T-shirts.

Self-study libraries were allowed to stay open past the curfew, but something didn’t look right to Cha. The students were all studying from the same worksheets, and there were a handful of adults milling about. He suspected this was a hagwon in disguise, in a clever attempt to circumvent the curfew.

One of the adults, a middle-aged woman wearing a green T-shirt, began arguing with Cha. “We are just doing our own work here. We didn’t teach,” she said, frowning. Cha shook his head.

“I saw you with the students,” he said.

Just then, a chubby boy, who appeared to be about fourteen, wandered out of one of the rooms. He looked around at the inspectors, cocking his head to the side. Then, shuffling along in his indoor flip-
flops, he walked up to the woman in green, holding up his worksheet and starting to ask a question. She shushed him and corralled him back into the room.

Cha informed the older man that the library would likely be suspended, and directed him to come to the government office the next day. The man listened quietly, with the same pained expression on his face.

Afterward, the squad made a few more stops at other self-study libraries, but nothing seemed out of place. Around midnight, Cha stood on the corner and lit one last cigarette, staring out at the neon lights of a city that was still very much awake. Then he headed home and went to sleep, taking comfort in the satisfaction that comes with liberating forty teenagers out of 4 million.

Eric would have gone anywhere, done almost anything, to get out of Korean high school. In order to comply with the requirements of his exchange program, however, he needed to remain in school. So, when he heard about a vocational college that would take foreigners, he pleaded with his exchange-program handlers to let him go. To get a spot, he would have to major in Chinese for business, but he didn’t hesitate. He wanted out of the pressure cooker, and he would have studied Chinese for bowling to get there.

His first day was in March. The college was on a hill, built around a large fountain that worked intermittently. The buildings were institutional, not unlike his high school. He walked into the Chinese-for-business class and found students talking and laughing with each other. One guy was wearing skinny jeans and boots. They sat around a table and waited for the professor. A young woman named Go-un introduced herself to Eric and asked him about what he’d been doing since he’d arrived in Korea.

“I was in high school.”

She looked at him for a moment. “For how long?”

“Six months.”

Her eyes widened. Then she tilted her head in sympathy. “Oh, I’m so sorry. No one should have to go to Korean high school.”

After class, the students lingered, chatting with each other. They asked for Eric’s cell-phone number and entered it into their phones. They walked leisurely to lunch. In college, Korean students had time to talk to the American kid. They thought about things other than their test scores. They had lives, and now Eric did, too.