"The catcher aims at a lump of lead / seeking its purity, / yet what is always shot at / is nothing but a blood-soaked, wounded bird." (Excerpt from "Bird" by Park Nam-su)
The National Education Committee has announced that essay and descriptive questions will be introduced in the CSAT starting with the 2033 academic year. This plan is included in the draft of the Medium- to Long-Term National Education Development Plan (2027–2036), which will be finalized in March next year. Once again, the catcher (the state) aims at lead (reforming the college entrance system) to achieve purity (nurturing future talent). Will the wounded bird (collapse of public education) become soaked in blood (explosion of private tutoring)? The history of Korean educational policy is one where national challenges for the future have repeatedly ended in defeat in the war against private tutoring.
Past governments sought to liberate elementary, middle, and high school students from "private tutoring" sequentially through measures such as the no-exam middle school system (1969), high school equalization policy (1974), and abolition of university entrance exams for high schools (1980). After democratization, they responded with "admissions instead of exams." They adopted direct approaches to strengthen public education, including early admissions (1997), the admissions officer system (2007), and comprehensive student record-based admissions (2015).
Private tutoring has adapted to both exams and admissions systems. Even as the population declines, per capita spending on private tutoring continues to rise. The most plausible hypotheses explaining private tutoring's undefeated status are status competition and lifetime income competition.
According to a recent paper titled "Status Competition and South Korea's Low Birth Rate," even birth rates have fallen due to status competition, where children's educational attainment is seen as a means of acquiring social status. In fact, admission to prestigious universities is considered an honor for the family. When Jeong Mong-jun (title omitted hereafter) was admitted to Seoul National University in 1970, Chung Ju-yung proudly boasted about his son. Lee Byung-chul reportedly said, "Why not our family?" and fell silent. Lee Jae-yong, class of '87, resolved a long-held grudge just before his grandfather's death (November 1987). This year, Lee Boo-jin and Hong Ra-hee displayed the essence of a mother's and grandmother's smiles at their son's and grandson's Seoul National University enrollment ceremonies. Wealth and academic credentials are distinct forms of status that cannot substitute for one another.
A representative case of lifetime income competition is the medical school frenzy. A few days ago, an article appeared stating that a retired doctor was hired in Sinan County, Gwangju Metropolitan City, Jeollanam-do, with a monthly salary of 33 million won. Even I, who will turn 60 next year despite taking exams at ages 4 and 7 and participating in elementary school medical school preparatory classes, felt a slight urge (or perhaps a dream) to challenge admission to medical school through the CSAT. Thus, the concentration on "medical" fields (departments of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, and veterinary medicine) is a rational choice. The problem is that as everyone acts rationally, society becomes increasingly irrational. The medical school frenzy cannot be resolved by simply condemning it as greed.
Even in school districts (especially Seoul Daechi-dong), competition for "two rabbits" — the "Me-Ui" (major medical schools) race and the "In-Seoul Medical" race — is underway. Students face a choice: transfer to rural areas to achieve top rank in their class through internal grades, or remain in Daechi-dong and challenge the CSAT. In the latter case, one must score nearly perfect on the CSAT; even with similar total scores, whether points were deducted in which subject determines success or failure. For top-tier students, life can change based on differences down to decimal places. This is why the country is turned upside down over seemingly trivial CSAT questions. In a relatively stable system where each student has spent decades building their own optimized private tutoring tower through years of effort, new changes are simply uncomfortable.
Private tutoring cannot be defeated by college entrance systems alone. To curb it, we must reduce the status and income gaps created by prestigious university affiliations and the careers they lead to. Only by addressing university hierarchies, easing the elitist society, reforming the dual structure of the labor market, eliminating disparities in lifetime income and job security across professions, and creating quality jobs through industrial restructuring can we hope to make some progress. Educational policy is, in effect, a strategy for national transformation.
The introduction of essay and descriptive questions on the CSAT will inevitably become prey for private tutoring the moment grading criteria are released, spawning "essay answers" and "descriptive answers." However, it is clear that children who can express and write their own thoughts will survive in the AI era better than those who merely select correct answers. From now on, the catcher aiming at the target should not be the state, but each of our individual children.
in OPINION
