SOUTH KOREA’S overworked children are well known to end the school day and head straight to hagwon (cram-school) courses to become music virtuosos or to gain an advantage over their peers in math or English. In North Korea, on the other hand, school is generally followed by compulsory work in the fields.
In recent years, however, school days in the North have come to resemble those in the South – at least for the privileged few. Of 116 recent North Korean defectors interviewed by researchers at Seoul National University this year, a third said they had received some form of private education during their stay in the North. Some had worked as private tutors themselves. Cho Jeong-ah of the South Korean Institute for National Unification believes that survey shows that opinions on education are changing among North Korean parents: it is increasingly seen as an investment that they can do in the future of their children, rather than as something to be accepted by all. -the rules in sense.
In theory, paying for education is illegal in North Korea. One of the main goals of universal education is to beat young minds the divine virtues of the Kim dynasty and the infallibility of the communist regime. Of course, only the state can trust to do it right. But in practice, North Koreans have had to pay even for education provided by the state since the famine of the 1990s, which devastated the supply of all kinds of public goods – not just the distribution of food but textbooks free, heated classrooms and teacher salaries.
Student accounts are required to pay teachers to report for work. If they could not pay, they were forced to help teachers harvest the crops or, in winter, bring firewood to class. The first private tutors were teachers from public schools who were trying to make ends meet. Since then, tutoring seems to have evolved into a profession in the gray economy of the state, with an average monthly cost per subject of around 200 Chinese yuan (the most used currency, worth 30 dollars). The regime is apparently willing to turn a blind eye to the informal sector hagwon as long as the parents are not too conspicuous to use them.
It is probably useful that the biggest beneficiaries of private tutoring are the children of the elite. According to Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean diplomat who defected south, parents in Pyongyang and provincial capitals use it to enroll their children in the best high schools. One of the advantages of these schools is that students are exempt from compulsory labor, which allows them to study to enter universities. Music and foreign language lessons are popular in hagwon, as this could help children find employment as diplomats or professional musicians, and therefore travel abroad. Chinese lessons are very popular in regions close to China because the language facilitates cross-border business.
The accounts of the defectors are probably not representative. They are, after all, an unusual group and private lessons can be much rarer than they suggest. However, for some parents, educational competition can be almost as consuming as in the capitalist South. A North Korean woman recently told a South Korean TV host that she had her daughter studied with a headlamp during power outages. Another said that she woke her nephew at 4:30 p.m. each morning to memorize English words. ■
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the title “Reading not weeding”