Emily Youngseo Son - Week Two Card News
Private Education is viewed as a significant factor in education in South Korea; it includes private tutoring and academies, also known as hagwon which costs an average of $3,000 a year per student.
However, it is not readily available for everyone–a family needs a certain amount of income to fully support their children and pay for private education. Moreover, Public Education is not effectively filling up the educational gap that the socioeconomic status of the parents has created.
According to the ‘Trends in the Education Gap in OECD Equity Index of Korea’ study in volume 21 of Seoul Studies, based on the data from Seoul Education Longitudinal Study from 2010 to 2018, the gap due to the difference in socioeconomic status worsened when students were in elementary and middle school. It would be crucial to make sure to supplement the curriculum of the school as the workload and difficulty rises, but schools do not fulfill this need well enough. Therefore students need individual support and resources from their family, but the opportunities and choices are mostly limited by the extent to which parents can support financially.
According to the SBS News, when asked about the special summer programs in academies in Daechi-dong, the center of Private Education, a student based in Chungbuk expressed his worry about the costs. Also, to questions regarding the main cause of the education gap, 40.9% of people answered it was the Private Education opportunity and parents’ economic power.
Reaching the quality of Private Education will be greatly challenging for Public Education, but some measure must be taken to halt the education gap from worsening. Many experts remarked that immediate solutions are difficult to find but that they will continue to seek ways to alleviate the situation in the future.
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