Hagwon Hell: On Teaching Kindergarten in South Korea

I’d always told myself, “If I were the teacher, I’d be the cool one.” The one who has monthly pizza parties, lets the class play heads up seven up all the time, a prize box full of legos and cool erasers, early recess and weekly airings of Bill Nye. But there was a reason the cool teachers were few and far between. The effort exerted giving your all to students day after day is not only exhausting but often not reciprocated or even allowed, especially in a country like South Korea. The education system here is a meat grinder, and little babies are fed into it from as early as age 4.

Before we really get into it, I should preface this by saying that I’ve loved living in South Korea. The people are beyond generous and kind, the culture is beautiful, the food delicious, the cities and countryside special to live in. I also know that my experience here is through the lens of a foreigner who doesn’t truly understand Korean culture, the expectations, social norms, pressures, etc. But I detest nationalism and also begrudge America for many reasons, so no country should be exempt from sound criticism, especially given most of my criticisms here relate to private education.

Privates school in Korean are called 학원 (Hagwon), and they’re found on every street corner with a constant stream of yellow vans whisking kids around between classes, recitals, practices and appointments. The parents are usually in tow, frazzled and scrambling after work to push their kid to the next study group or extracurricular. Korea has a special love for education, according to many measures, they are the most educated country in the world. The pressure to go to college and eventually succeed in your career is equated to your worthiness to breathe air. The competition is stiff and so the age at which kids are shoved into the system has dropped lower and lower.

I decided to teach English at a kindergarten in Korea for the same reasons others fall into it. Initially I was drawn to the ability to live abroad and experience a different culture while meeting people, as well as build a new set of skills teaching and working with kids, all while saving money. And all of those things happened and continue to be reasons why people stick around, but the system here started to grate on me.

Teachers here either book a flight home after a week of terror at some sunken hell of a workplace, where your contract, rights and humanity are disrespected, or they cozy up to a comparably acceptable lifestyle where their school treats them with the bare minimum level of decency, collecting minimum wage and eating their way through the country. If you’re in the later group, it only takes a year or two before you’ve grown two sizes, and you recognize how flawed and strange the education system here is.

Sure, given the right circumstances you will be permitted to build relationships with students, inspire them to grow and learn, and actually have a lot of fun working with young people who remind you that life ain’t so bad. But once you realize that these kids are actually only 5 years old, and are already at a 3rd grade reading level, you question if it’s ethical the way they got there.

My first kindergarten class was Korean age 6, “international age” 5. The first day of teaching was a total crapshoot, as it is customary here to hire college graduates with no experience teaching and no proper training beforehand. And while it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to teach a room of thumb-suckers, there are absolutely teaching methods, philosophies, and a general understanding of childhood development that should be required to land this job. But Korea decided that’s not important. What’s important is that my little princess goes to a three-thousand dollar a month private school and gets taught by a pretty white passing westerner (hiring practices here are highly discriminatory) with a perfect accent and cool disposition! Education here is a fashion as much as it is a practice.

The first day of teaching I also quickly learned just who got to attend these Hagwons. Little 5 year old hands were hoisting their Gucci and Burberry winter coats up to me to hang in their cubby, a thousand dollar jacket they’d outgrow in a month. During holidays it was common to receive hundreds of dollars worth of gifts from boujee parents showing they could afford it. On kid’s birthdays, massive custom cakes lined with handmade pokemon figurines were nearly required lest you be shamed, the kids themselves noticing when another parent had cheaped out on their classmates’ party. These “parties” are photo-op only anti-fun zones. Much of the food was trashed after being used as props for photos, a chaotic rush to appear having fun at school before reassembling back into cramming formation. There are workbook pages to get through.

Science “classes” were the same, mountains of plastic bags were summoned containing tools and objects to experiment and take photos with, co-teachers rushing around clicking away on their camera phone, adding to the chaos. The amount of waste produced by pre-made science kits in these classrooms  – there must be a dedicated landfill somewhere. After a few minutes, the experiments immediately go into the trash, because if an accident happens on the way home, we are liable.

In a similar vein, these Hagwons tout themselves as “English academies” but are actually subject comprehensive daycares that operate in English. This is, like most things Hagwons do, illegal, as English teachers in Korea are, according to law, only allowed to teach “conversational english, grammar, and vocabulary.”’ Why, then, was I assembling mountain high piles of paper and crafts supplies that students couldn’t even put together themselves?

Because there are parents to please. They want higher tests scores, prettier crafts to show off, and higher level words for their child to throw around, all in the name of impressing their parents unrealistically high expectations. These expectations were the basis of most teachers and managers ills in hagwon life. As we know, the customer is always right, and these customers drop mad cash for their kids.

As such, these parents usually have plenty of time and money to assert their will, the threat of lawsuits just one apparatus used to get their way. On one occasion, we were warned that the school next door is going through a court case because of an incident in the bathrooms. The parents had banded together to accuse the school of child abuse, likely to no fault of the English teachers, as they are often understaffed and burdened with unmanageable expectations and numbers of students. Usually the incidents are quite minor – a student slipping and getting a cut, a pencil punctured in mistake, resulting in a school wide ban of… pencils. A school with no pencils. Catastrophizing was the name of the game.

And so these Hagwons are infested with CCTVs, the lobbies usually with a TV showing a livestream of every nook and cranny of the school. While this can be a comfort for teachers conducting themselves properly, it can also be a tool the school uses against its staff. Usually hagwon managers will pick a newbie or two to micromanage and harass to establish pecking order. Every move you make will be wrong – this lesson plan isn’t hyphenated, you showed a video for three minutes too long, your craft is not pretty enough, you need to stand up during every minute of instruction, you shouldn’t give kids gifts like that, you shouldn’t take off your mask to eat in front of kids, but also you have no break time to feed yourself, we saw you on the CCTV sitting at your desk when a student arrived… the list of micromanaged complaints never ends.

Once, my ice cream I was looking forward to eating during our lunch break had magically disappeared from the break room fridge. I made a stink about it as a joke, but the desk managers entertained me and scrubbed through CCTV footage to find that the janitor who lived under the staircase (yes, you read that right) had crept out from his tomb late in the night to steal what wasn’t his. He deserved it, though, his back was arched and crumbling over as he slaved away for this Hagwon, “cleaning” every surface in the school without any soap or solution to cut through the layers of filth created everyday (the school couldn’t allocate a budget for bleach or cleaning solution). In return, the school let him live under the staircase, in the school itself. Everything you just read actually happened but almost certainly wasn’t legal!

In retrospect many of these horror stories are funny, but at the time laughing at the absurdity was what got me through much of it. Most Hagwons at some point conduct “open class,” a rehearsed circus where parents are welcomed to join and witness their child recite, word for word, paragraphs of texts they don’t even understand. For months we prepared by drilling our 5 year old students with scripts a third grader would hardly understand. Of course my students protested in what ways they could. “Why do I need to recite this 20 times a day?” was the question asked in body language and simple vocabulary. I could never give a good answer, but sometimes the truth would slip out… “Because your mom wants to see you beat out the others. I don’t know.” You could see the frustration in their body language and face as they tried memorizing everything, and the personal guilt of acting as a conduit for these parents and managers expectations of a little kid felt truly terrible and borderline like child abuse.

Their childhood is very unlike the one I had. There is no recess, there is no outdoor area or access to sunshine, and there is no outlet to expend energy and move your body, except for one 30 minute gym class a week. Just 4 walls, a mountain of textbooks, and twenty 5 year olds who are expected to stay in their seats and shut up. This is common across the city of Seoul, as Hagwons are packed between other businesses in buildings without access to outdoor spaces. The discipline system required to keep the attention and behavior of this amount of students in line is dictator-esque, as one soldier out of line causes a ripple effect, and before you know it, the army has descended into a chaotic civil war, children screaming out of unison, prodding each other, walking about and harassing others, tipping out of their chairs, marking all over their desks, sticking their hands in the trenches of their pants, hurting themselves in every creative way, all out warfare that you can guarantee a manager will conveniently be passing by in the hallway to witness. 

With this many kids the teacher is playing whack-a-mole, screaming at one out of line behavior before another pops up. It leaves no time to actually address the subject at hand, babysitting rather than teaching. And, because each kid is allotted so little one-on-one attention, children with special needs are steamrolled by a system where there is only one way to behave or learn. In Korea there is not much grace given to the subject of disability, the mere suggestion that a child might have a special need taken as an insult rather than something that needs to be addressed in order for the child to develop at a healthy pace and in a healthy manner.

Breaks were few and far between, for students and teachers. From 9AM to 6PM, it wasn’t uncommon for teachers to be on their feet all day with only 3 minute breaks between hour long classes, of which they are usually booked for all day. In order for anyone to have a moment to breathe, attention is usually directed towards some random YouTube video in order for a few minutes of quiet and space to grade papers or use the bathroom. It’s non-stop, 5 days a week, with 2 weeks of vacation each year. Pitiful.

The result of such a structured and high pressure system is good marks on tests and an English speaking level often frightening to be hearing from such squeaky, small, cute voices. I recall one tiny student, beyond adorable, nearly the size of a large doll, reciting sentences she’d memorized but didn’t really understand. My heart melted every time we interacted because she was genuinely smart and cute, naive to the looming monster of the Korean education system, one which she was adapting far too early to.

When you advocate for any change in these schools, bringing up issues or suggestions to staff that would benefit students or teachers, it often falls on deaf ears. Korean work culture is radically different from what I knew back home. A glimpse of the Korean staff meetings were sobering – they sat in silence, no questions, ifs, ands, or buts. Take the directions of your superiors and do your job. On the reverse, the foreign teacher meetings were like group therapy sessions. The frustrations of everything – teaching at defunct schools, living abroad, being far from family and their “normalcy” – all came out in these meetings, pointed directly at managers who were stuck between a rock – parents and principals, and a hard place – teachers. 

Once you’ve reached the end of your rope, unheard and burnt out, you too are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Quitting is not an easy process here. Visas are tied to your workplace, and often your housing is too. So, the suggestion of quitting out of exhaustion is levied back at you in threat. If you quit, you won’t get a letter of release, which prevents you from finding new work, the only option left being an immediate flight out of the country. Contractually, foreigners have little rights or legal recourse here, and so the easiest way out of the tunnel is going through it until your contract expires. On one occasion, I had the managers begrudgingly tear apart every foreign teachers contract in one-on-one meetings, replaced with an illegally made new one. A week prior I pointed out being contractually allowed to take my 30 minute lunch break away from the classroom. That clause was quickly removed, without our consent.

Though my first reason for leaving teaching behind is career oriented, the reason I’d recommend against feeding into the system and working at a Hagwon is twofold – for the youth of Korea’s benefit, and in protection of your own mental health. The amount of unethically organized schools here is too damn high, and the couple I got a taste of during my two year stint teaching was enough. When my own Korean co-teachers told me even they wouldn’t let their child step foot in a Hagwon… they mirrored the frustrations I’d felt everyday walking into a workplace with little regard for kids, teachers, or human beings.

I should caveat all of this by saying – I’m sure places of education all over the world face these exact problems or variations of them. The degree to which Korean culture adheres to or births any of these problems is up for debate, and my experience is sigular, but quite acidic. I left with a lot of bad experiences, none of which applied to the kids. The problem, was the machine.

Ultimately I accomplished what I set out to do – learn to tolerate children and experience something entirely different. Even amidst the chaos, books, parent pressure, mean teachers and psycho managers, I will never forget the cute little faces that looked to me as their role model everyday. I took it quite seriously and answered every question they had, listened to every story, entertained every request, let them crawl all over me with their sticky hands, pick at my hair and my brain, often giving me more insight into the life we experience than I did for them. There are many days I miss it now, actually. There is an unfettered joy, optimism, curiosity, and strangely enough, deep wisdom within tiny brains like that.

I danced on the roof during my breaks and recorded myself doing it so they could have their own freestyle dance teacher. I put on voices and flailed around, wearing costumes, jewels, papers and trinkets they’d place on me, all for a quick laugh and respite from the bookwork. I hunched over their little desks and drew them any pokemon they requested. I opened their juice boxes and snacks, sneaking what leftovers I could before wiping their faces and cleaning the littered floors. I had my childhood Star Wars Legos shipped overseas to give them to my student who I knew would cherish them most. I accepted every drawing they gifted me, hung it on the wall, even when my co-teacher turned around to trash it every time. I illustrated their ideas and even turned it into a book, dedicated to the class. I decorated the room with their interests and gifted them accordingly, putting together care packages and personalized letters to send them off to their next year of Hagwon hell. 

At the end of it, at least I can say I held up my end of the deal, being a teacher here. Perhaps I can even say I was the cool teacher.