Where educational rank is the main route to status, exam competition, private tutoring and household spending on schooling grow beyond the reach of any policy meant to cap them.
Education fever is the Korean name for the intensity with which families pursue schooling, studied by Michael Seth in Education Fever (2002). Its markers are a university entrance examination that sets the national calendar, a private hagwon industry that governments have repeatedly tried and failed to restrain, and Seoul's 10 p.m. curfew on cram schools.
In practice
- A government caps tutoring hours, and the tutoring moves online and into private homes.
- A family moves house for a district's cram schools rather than its state schools.
- Standing
- Scholars link it both to the Confucian examination tradition and to the post-war reality that schooling was the fastest route out of poverty; how much is culture and how much is incentive is debated. Compare shadow education.
- Subject
- Learning & Education
- Essay
- Theories of teaching, and what schools are for