나오미 in korea

In what is destined to be regarded as a Very Bad Idea, I’ve agreed to go to jazz dance classes with my Korean workmates. The classes are five times a week from 9pm until 11pm. Five times a week. For two hours.

Why must Korean people approach every educational or sporting activity with such unyielding and unsustainable commitment? Last year I took up taekwondo, which required a minimum commitment of ten hours a week. The lessons were reluctantly reduced to eight hours a week when we lazy, fat, piggy Westerners baulked at the idea of losing our early Friday night drinks. My students attend academies, schools, camps and training programs from after school until late evening, again in the weekends, and if they can afford it, their summer holidays at an educational camp.

The pressure is huge for young students. I have a girl in my class who’s at school from 9am until 3:45, then attends extension English class until 5:30. She then goes home for an hour to eat dinner, and packs her bag again to come to my English class. At 8:30pm, she goes to a study room and studies until 11pm, after which, presumably, she goes home and sleeps the deep sleep of the intensely over-educated. She’s 14.

Another boy finishes school, has kendo (Japanese martial art) until 5pm, comes to my English class, goes to math and science academy, then Chinese class, and gets home around 11pm. He doesn’t seem to have a dinner break and is always high on snack food.

Their lives aren’t unusual, nor particularly noteworthy in a culture where education is the most important thing in a child’s life. It’s not unusual, but in my mind is certainly not natural, right or sustainable. These students study about fifteen hours out of 24, and will continue to do so in increasingly ridiculous hours and patterns at least until they get into university, where the pressure will only increase.

Even my younger, primary age students have packed schedules. After school they go to taekwondo, ballet, art class, Scouts, and then finally English at 6:30. By the time I get them they are absolute monsters, over-hyped, slack-jawed and red-faced, high on candy and stuffing fistfuls of chips into their mouths. It’s that, or dropping their heads on their desks and falling asleep, before waking up and whining that they’re tired or hungry.

These kids are eight, nine, ten years old. There’s not much grass or playgrounds for them to expend their energy on, even though we’re in a relatively quiet and surburban (for Korea) part of the city. It’s no wonder they slam doors on each other, hide under the desks, cry, scream, swing on their chairs and stuff crayons in their ears. Often I feel like doing the same.

My adult student Civil Engineer tells me that Korean students who go to New Zealand to study often can’t be convinced to come home again. There, they’re top of their classes, studying far more than their slacker New Zealand peers, and the family and social pressure to succeed at all costs is diffused by distance.

For all the emphasis Koreans place on ‘well-being’ and eating healthy foods; for all the red ginseng, green tea, tofu, exercising, skincare, cupping, stress-reducing massage and multi-grain rice they eat; for all Korea’s much-lauded statistics on heart disease (conveniently ignoring their high rate of stomach and lung cancers) they’re destroying their kids with over-expectations, packed schedules and heavy workloads.

How is it healthy for my ex-student So-min, now attending a poncy all-English international high school near Seoul, to spend her school days studying until 3am, then waking at 7am and starting again? The emails I receive from her are fraught with distress and there’s nothing I can tell her to do, except to get a good night’s sleep and eat properly. But how can she when her fellow students are following the same punishing schedule and she ends up berating herself for not spending enough time studying? So-min is thirteen.