How to Cure South Korea’s English Fever?
November 12, 2013 Leave a comment
November 12, 2013, 9:52 AM
How to Cure South Korea’s English Fever?
By Jasper Kim
How much should a country pay to master the English language? Based on the economics and outcomes of English tuition in South Korea today, the country is throwing excessive amounts at the task with meager results. According to Swiss-based language learning company EF Education First, the average South Korean gets nearly 20,000 hours of English education from kindergarten through university. Much of that tuition comes at private institutes known as hagwon that Korean kids flock to stay ahead in the nation’s hyper-competitive educational race. There are currently over 17,000 hagwon that teach English in South Korea. That’s roughly one hagwon for every 647 students.The annualized growth rate of the hagwon industry from 2005 to 2009 was an astonishing 20.5%, according to Kookmin Financial Group.
On the student side, in 2012 alone, total expenditures on private education were approximately 19 trillion won ($17.7 billion), according to Statistics Korea. The average cost of private education per student is nearly 3 million won per year, or around 13% of total economic output by value per person.
Still, with so much spending based on South Korea’s notorious “English fever,” surely there must be a nice payoff to show for it.
Unfortunately, this has not been the case. In a recent English Proficiency Index surveyof 60 countries worldwide by EF Education First, South Korea ranked 24th–just two notches ahead of Japan and below Argentina and the Czech Republic. Based on this evidence, South Korea ranks as a mid-tier English speaking country at the global scale.
Malcolm Gladwell argues in his best-selling book Outliers that it takes about 10,000 hours to become a “genius” in a particular area. South Korean kids get double that amount of training but most clearly aren’t geniuses.
So what is the solution?
While there is no silver bullet, there are some radical options. One approach could be for the country to embrace English fully and entirely by making it an official national language (similar to Singapore), requiring it at all levels.
Or perhaps South Korea should focus on less (not more) English education for most of its students–continuing “extreme English” only for those who will need it on a regular basis for their future global career trajectory.
This would free up not just capital, but millions of South Korean young minds to learn the skill-sets that most interest and fit their individual talents.
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