Recommended read: Cracking down hagwons & reforming Korean education (by Time Magazine)

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

South Korea’s hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country’s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. “One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable,” President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

This is such a surprise, though I’m not sure if it’s a nice one. I like how the country’s finally stepping up and doing something about its messed up education system, but “hagwon crackdowns”? I know this is just a part of the entire system of reforms they’re implementing, and I do agree that shutting down hagwons is part of the remedy, but I can’t help but feel something is off here.

Why are hagwon owners getting criminalized now? After all, they’re only responding to the natural supply-and-demand forces of the bigger economy. What needs to be focused on is what’s currently taking place — this shift of values. Police are snooping around sending kids home from midnight private schools, but does society really understand what exactly is going on? People do things in reaction to their immediate reality — that is, merely on the basis of their personal lives. They see authorities shutting down their businesses, they’re not gonna think, “oh, they’re doing this for the better” — no. They’re going to get mad, ask why the government is taking away their jobs (remember, South Korea’s not faring so well in the employment sector), and they’re going to either re-open business or succumb to darker means of sustaining a livelihood. It’s just going to be this endless cycle of delinquency. What the government needs to do is ensure that their people a) understand that new values are emerging and will be enforced, b) assure (and enforce the assurance) that their kids will receive the education they need, and c) convince (and prove) that putting the kids through extra hours of studying will really not do anyone any good. How can this be achieved? Government-funded seminars, public awareness campaigns, strict enforcement on universities to drop the current admissions process and integrate the unacademia-based approach into their regulations, and, well, in my eyes, abolish the entrance-exam system, although that may be going out on a limb. But seriously, that may exactly be one of the biggest igniters of competition among students… and by that, I actually mean among parents.

Parenting is probably the most important area of concern — it’s the values Korean parents are instilling into their children. But in order to target that and attain significant results, you’re probably gonna have to dig deep into the East-Asian mind and not only sort through the many tenets of Confucianism and Hobbesianism, but attempt to uproot some of them as well. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.