Pressure to study on children here greater than anywhere else

Children take an exam at an elementary school in Daegu on March 5. Recent research showed that the pressure on Korean children to study is almost the highest in the world. / Yonhap

By Kim Rahn

An eight-year-old girl in Seoul, surnamed Nam, attends extra-curricular programs after her school finishes around 1 p.m. After taking science and reading classes, she goes to two hagwon everyday during weekdays, with subjects changing throughout the week, from swimming to piano, painting, math and English.

On Saturday, she attends another English lesson.

During last winter vacation when she attended several more hagwon, she suffered from nosebleeds a couple of times. She follows the tight study schedule set by her parents because she is still too young to disobey, but she sometimes complains that she wants more time to play with her friends.

Nam's story may sound extreme, but her experience is similar to what is happening to large numbers of elementary school children here. And as they get older, the pressure to study intensifies.

A recent survey reflected this reality, showing that pressure on Korean children to study is almost the highest in the world while their life satisfaction is almost at the bottom.

Researcher Kim Mi-sook at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs compared Korean children's subjective wellbeing with that of other countries by using the Korean government's general research on minors in 2013 and UNICEF's "Children's Subjective Well-being in Rich Countries" report. The survey for the latter report was conducted between 2009 and 2010 in 29 countries. Kim's research used data of children aged 11, 13 and 15.

Surveyed children rated their pressure of school work between 0 and 4, and those who rated it at 3 or higher were categorized as under pressure. In Korea, 50.5 percent of children rated it at 3 or above, far higher than the 29 countries' average of 33.3 percent. It was almost threefold the Netherlands' 16.8 percent.

About 44 percent of Finland's children were under pressure to study; 42.1 percent in the United Kingdom; 40.6 percent in the United States; 24.7 percent in Switzerland; 23.9 percent in Germany; and 20.8 percent in France.

Probably because of such pressure, only 18.5 percent of Korean children said that they liked school life a lot, the fifth lowest among a total of 30 countries and far lower than the average, 26.7 percent.

The countries with lower school life satisfaction than Korea were the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy and Estonia. Children in Ireland showed the highest degree of satisfaction with their schools, 42.5 percent, while those in the United Kingdom and the United States had close to average levels, 27.6 percent and 30.7 percent, respectively.

Accordingly, Korean children are not very satisfied with their lives in general. On a scale from 0 to 10 for life satisfaction, 60.3 percent of Korean children picked 6 or higher, which means they were satisfied, while percentages in most of the other countries exceeded 80.

Only two other nations had less than 80 percent ― Romania, 76.6 percent, and Poland, 79.7 percent ― but even their figures were much higher than Korea's.

"Korean children had good physical health but their emotional health is poor," Kim said, adding that this reflects Korea's high academic achievement-oriented school environment.

"If children are not satisfied with their lives, it infringes on their rights to happiness and damages their mental health, and can result in more dangers such as addiction, delinquency and even suicide."

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