Korea’s ‘education fever’ from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century

Walking down the streets of Seoul’s upscale Taech’i or Apkujǒng wards in the Gangnam district, one immediately spots young people rushing to ‘cram schools’ (hagwǒn) under the glistening advertisements for private tutoring. Even as late as 11 p.m., Seoul’s subways are crowded with children and adolescents who return home after having spent the first half of the day in public school and the latter in a private institute. These observations offer a first impression of the pressurised environment surrounding education in today’s South Korea. ‘Education fever’ (kyoyuk yŏlgi), or a ‘passion for education’, so it seems, has for long been ingrained into Korean society and appears as an age-old excitement for study. As early as 1909, when the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement (aeguk kyemŏng undong) was exciting the country, the German-language newspaper of Shanghai, Ostasiatischer Lloyd, observed a ‘feverous excitement’ among Koreans and an ‘extraordinarily lively urge to get educated’. This was not restricted to the male population, as the Presbyterian missionary Annie Baird testified when she wrote in 1909: