[The Editors' Verdict] "Chun Doo-hwan's Blade" Can't Tame Private Education

In December 2004, 19 years ago, I went overseas to Palestine for reporting and visited a home in the capital, Ramallah. The shabby house where a middle-aged single mother lived with her son was located in a working-class residential area still bearing the remnants of Israeli airstrikes. Inside the yellowed plaster walls, there were hardly any proper household items, but notably, a state-of-the-art LG desktop computer was placed on the child's desk.

She did not even know that LG was a Korean company, let alone the country of Korea itself. When asked why she bought this computer, her answer was, "Because it was the best." I remember her proud expression as she said, "I bought the best one for my child's tutoring, even if it was a stretch." It was then that I learned that Palestine, often reported only as a terrorist group, actually has about 20 universities that admit students based on national academic test scores, and that private tutoring for entrance exams exists there.

The desire of parents to send their children to good schools is an 'instinct.' The existence of private education, which feeds on this parental instinct, is therefore universal across wealth, geography, and time, and it does not disappear. When cracked down on, it simply goes underground.

The strongest private education policy in our history was the complete ban on private tutoring by the National Security Planning Agency under Chun Doo-hwan's regime on July 30, 1980. The police began cracking down on private tutoring two weeks after the July 30 measure. Throughout the Fifth Republic government, the crackdown on private tutoring was severe, but in some parts of the elite school districts, there was an 'underground cartel' that escaped the crackdown. Some 'social elites' protected by influential positions secretly hired their children's school teachers for private tutoring. However, their names never appeared in investigations into illegal private tutoring among the wealthy and privileged.

If such underground private education still exists, it must be eradicated. However, nowadays, such 'secret tutoring' does not exist at all. Private education has transformed into a massive, open industry supported by the educational instincts of all Korean students' parents. Star instructors' fees have risen so high according to market principles that no matter how powerful or wealthy one is, monopolizing them is impossible.

After President Yoon Suk-yeol's directive on the 15th of last month to "exclude killer questions from the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT)," the government launched a crackdown on private education corruption, but the results were meager. There are 7,771 registered entrance exam and cram academies in Seoul alone (according to the 2021 Seoul Basic Statistical Yearbook), yet only 33 minor cases were reported in this crackdown. The National Tax Service began tax investigations on four private education companies and one top instructor, and the Ministry of Education uncovered 24 cartel cases and 4 irregularities. Wielding the crackdown tools used decades ago against underground private education on a business-driven, open private education sector barely scratched the surface.

Since private education has changed, the response must also change. Not all open private education should be eradicated. A surgical plan must be devised and precisely executed to restructure this massive overheated industry. It is not a matter to be handled by the Ministry of Education, which is flustered even by a single killer question. President Yoon must provide direction and leadership. Since pointing out the killer questions, President Yoon has not made any additional remarks for nearly a month. We hope he is drawing a grand national plan to normalize public education and refine private education.