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Fast Earners South Korea's Millionaire, Celebrity Schoolteachers World News The Guardian
Fast Earners South Korea's Millionaire, Celebrity Schoolteachers World News The Guardian
celebrity schoolteachers
Obsessive ‘cram school’ education culture has given some tutors pop7star
profiles and wealthy lifestyles
Anna Fifield for the Washington Post
Fri 16 Jan 2015 22.59 GMT
C
lasping his headphones and closing his eyes as he sang into the
studio microphone while performing a peppy duet with one of
South Korea’s hottest actresses, spiky-haired Cha Kil-yong
looked every bit the K-pop star.
But Cha is not a singer or actor. No, he’s a unique kind of South Korean
celebrity: a teaching star. And the song he was singing with Clara, a Korean
mega-celebrity, in an MTV-style music video? It was called “SAT jackpot!”
Teaching pays: Cha said he earned $8m last year. “I’m madly in love with
maths,” he said, looking the height of trendiness in his crimson shirt and
trousers and tweed jacket, in his office in Gangnam – a wealthy part of
Seoul famous for its conspicuous consumption and featured in the song
Gangnam Style.
It’s hard to exaggerate the premium South Korea places on education. This
is a society in which you have to get into the right kindergarten, so that
you can get into the right elementary school, then into the right middle
school and high school, and finally into the right college. Which, of course,
gets you the right job and scores you the right spouse.
Many Korean families split and live on opposite sides of the world in
pursuit of a better education: the mother and children live in the United
States or another English-speaking country, the better to secure entry to a
prestigious university (preferably Harvard). The “goose father” continues
working in South Korea, flying in to visit when he can.
All of this combines to make South Korea’s equivalent of the SAT the most
important event in a young person’s life.
This devotion to studying is credited with helping South Korea rank at the
top of the developed world in reading, maths and science, although the
latest rankings [PDF] from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development also show that Korean students come last when asked
whether they are happy at school. South Korea also has the highest
suicide rate in the developed world, which many suggest is related to a
high-stress focus on test scores.
Some politicians and educators are questioning whether things have got
out of hand. But even parents opposed to this punishing system find it
difficult to opt out – their children complain that they can’t keep up if they
don’t go to a hagwon.
That’s good news for instructors like Cha, who started teaching at a
hagwon to pay his way through his PhD programme.
About 300,000 students take his online class at any given time, paying $39
for a 20-hour course (traditional cram schools charge as much as $600 for
a course). He teaches them tricks for taking the timed exams, including
shortcuts that students can take to solve a problem faster.
Asked what makes him stand out as an instructor, Cha said: “Suppose you
give the same ingredients to 100 different chefs. They would make
different dishes even though they’re working with the same ingredients.
It’s the same with a maths class. Even though it’s all maths and all in
Korean, you can use different ingredients to come up with different
results.”
His studio is set up with a green chalkboard and desks, and behind the
camera are piles of props – including hippo and Batman masks and a gold-
sequined jacket.
Maintaining his position doesn’t require just good lessons. Kwon, 33, also
gets regular facials and works out, and he said some teachers even have
stylists.
“I always wanted to be a teacher, but I feel that regular school teaching has
its limits. There is a certain way you have to teach,” said Kwon, whose
lessons appear on the sites Etoos and VitaEdu. “And, of course, I’m
making a lot more money this way.”
“All this late-night study could lead to problems in enhancing their other
skills, like character, creativity and critical thinking,” he said. “Hagwon is
all about rote learning and memorisation.”
Lee said all the problems stem from the college admissions procedures,
which have been slow in looking beyond test scores to other criteria such
as extracurricular activities and personal essays, as is common in many
western countries.
“We really need to change,” said Lee, who is now a professor at the Korea
Development Institute’s School of Public Policy and Management.
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Topics
South Korea
Asia Pacific
Teaching
K-pop
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