As the sun was dipping behind the pine hills surrounding this rural campus one recent Monday, Chung Il-wook and his wife drove up with Min-ju, their 18-year-old daughter. They gave her a quick hug and she hurried into the school building, dragging a suitcase behind her.
Inside, a raucous crowd of 300 teenage boys and girls had returned from a two-night leave and were lining up to have their teachers search their bags.
The students here were forsaking all the pleasures of teenage life. No cellphones allowed, no fashion magazines, no television, no Internet. No dating, no concerts, no earrings, no manicures — no acting their age.
All these are mere distractions from an overriding goal. On this regimented campus, miles from the nearest public transportation, Min-ju and her classmates cram from 6:30am to past midnight, seven days a week, to clear the fearsome hurdle that can decide their future — the national college entrance examination.
“Min-ju, do your best! Fighting!” Chung shouted as his daughter disappeared into the building. Min-ju turned around and raised a clenched fist.
“Fighting!” she shouted back.
South Koreans say their obsession to get their children into top-notch universities is nothing short of “a war.”
Nowhere is that zeal better illustrated than cram schools like Jongro Yongin Campus, located in a sparsely populated suburb of Yongin, near Seoul.
Most Jongro students are jaesoo sang, or “study-again students.” Having failed to get into the university of their choice, they are preparing relentlessly for next year’s entrance examination. Some try and try again, for three years running after graduating from high school.
The Jongro school pursues a strategy of isolation, cut off from competing temptations of any sort. Its curriculum is so tightly regulated and the distractions so few that students say they have no option but to study.
“Sending Min-ju here was not an ideal, but an inevitable choice,” said Chung, a 50-year-old accountant. “In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person’s future. It’s a sad reality. But you have to acknowledge it; otherwise you hurt your children’s future.”
Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious young South Korean. The university that students attend in their 20s can determine the jobs they get and the money they make in their 50s. The top-tier schools — Seoul National, Korea and Yonsei universities, collectively known as SKY — may hardly register on global lists of the very best in higher education. But here, their diplomas are a ticket of admission, an envied status symbol and a badge of pride for graduates and their parents.
The life of a South Korean child, from kindergarten to high school, is dominated by the need to excel in standardized entrance examinations for college.
The system is so demanding that it is credited with fueling the nation’s outstanding economic success. It is also widely criticized for the psychological price it exacts from young people. Among young people 10 to 19, suicide is the second most common cause of death, after traffic accidents.
When virulent anti-government protests shook the country this summer, most notably over South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s agreement to import beef from the US, many demonstrators were teenagers protesting the pressure-cooker conditions they endured at school.
Among the criticisms of Lee were accusations that he filled too many top government posts with people tied to Korea University, his alma mater. Yet when the president replaced his entire staff in June, all but one of 10 new senior secretaries had graduated from the nation’s three best-known universities.
About 600,000 Korean students enter colleges each year — 10,000 of them at the SKY schools — and more than one in five are jaesoo saeng who have redeemed themselves through cramming.
“I first felt ashamed,” said Chung Yong-seok, 19, who is trying again for Korea University after being denied admission last year. “I asked myself what I was doing in a place like this when all my friends were having a good time in college. But I consider a year in this place as an investment for a better future.”
Many of these hopefuls study alone or commute daily to a private institute. Many others enroll in one of the 50 boarding cram schools that have sprung up around Seoul.
Jongro opened last year. Its four-story main building houses classrooms and dormitories, with eight beds per room. The school day begins at 6:30am, when whistles pierce the quiet and teachers stride the hallways, shouting: “Wake up!”
After exercise and breakfast, they are in their classrooms by 7:30am, 30 pupils per class. Each room includes a few music stands, for students who stand to keep from dozing.
A final roll call comes at 12:30am, after which students may go to bed, unless they opt to cram more, until 2am.
The routine relaxes on Saturday and Sunday, when students have an extra hour to sleep and two hours of free time. Every three weeks the students may leave the campus for two nights.
The curriculum has no room for romance. Notices in hallways and classrooms forbid any conversation between boys and girls that is unrelated to study; exchanging romantic notes; hugging, hooking arms or other physical contact. Punishment includes several days of cleaning a classroom or restroom or even expulsion.
“We girls hear which girls boys consider pretty,” Park Eom-ji, 19, said. “But we don’t use much cosmetics, we don’t dye our hair, we don’t wear conspicuous clothes.”
“We know what we are here for,” she said.
Kim Sung-woo, 32, who teaches at Jongro, remembered the even more spartan regimen of the cram school that he attended. In his day, he said, students desperate for a break slipped off campus at night by climbing walls topped with barbed wire. Corporal punishment was common.
Things are no longer that tough — too many parents complained.
Still, “this place — metaphorically speaking — is a prison,” said Kim Kap-jung, a deputy headmaster at Jongro. “The students come under tremendous pressure when the exam date approaches and their score doesn’t improve. Girls weep during counseling and boys run away and don’t return.”
In some schools, as many as 40 percent of the students drop out.
South Korean parents are notably willing to sacrifice for their children’s futures. More than 80 percent of high school graduates go to college.
The percentage of private spending on education, 2.8 percent of South Korea’s gross domestic product in 2004, is the highest among the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“It’s a big financial burden for me,” said Park Hong-ki, 50, referring to the US$1,936 a month that he pays to have his son at Jongro.
Students write themselves pep notes on pieces of colored sticky paper and keep them on their desks.
“I may shed tears of sadness today, but tomorrow I will shed tears of happiness,” one said.
Another admonished: “Think about the sacrifices your parents make to send you here.”
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