The Fail - Chapter 01
Daechi-dong – A Machine That Manufactures Children
Daechi-dong: The System
I do not wish to open this narrative with the predictable nostalgia of childhood memories. Instead, I will begin with a place—Daechi-dong is not simply a neighborhood but a spatial apparatus, a topology where education is reorganized into an economy of discipline.
Within a ten-mile radius of Daechi-dong, there are thirty-one high schools, and within a single mile, more than two thousand private academic centers are packed densely together. In total, 3,457 private education institutions are registered in the area, according to the National Education Information System (NEIS).[1]
With clusters of dense high-rise buildings, many of which house multiple hagwons on the same floor, Daechi-dong unfolds as a vertical labyrinth of manufactured ambition, a place where learning is no longer an act of becoming but an architecture of discipline imposed upon the young. Some of the more prominent academies occupy entire buildings, but most rent out some spot in commercial towers.
In the same building, you might find a PC room, a study café, a convenience store, and three different math hagwons stacked on top of one another—an entire ecosystem compressed into glass and concrete. Cafés, including study cafés, are commonly used for studying in Daechi-dong.
Study cafés in particular are operated by business owners who cater specifically to students; customers pay an hourly rate for a spots, and these cafés are used solely for studying, much like a library. Since they are classified as cafés rather than educational institutions, they are not subject to instruction regulations such as the 10 p.m. curfew and typically operate 24 hours.
According to Article 16, Paragraph 2 of the Act on the Establishment and Operation of Private Teaching Institutes and Extracurricular Lessons as defined by the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea, “In consideration of the impact on school classes and students’ health, the Superintendent of Education may determine the instructional hours of subject-based private academies, teaching institutes, or private tutors within the scope set by municipal or provincial ordinances. In doing so, the Superintendent must consult with parents and relevant organizations.”[2]
Accordingly, Article 8 of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education Ordinance on the Establishment and Operation of Private Educational Institutes and Extracurricular Lessons stipulates that: “The instructional hours for subject-based private academies (hagwons), teaching institutes, and private tutors, as defined in Article 16, Paragraph 2 of the Act, shall be from 05:00 to 22:00. However, private study facilities may extend their operating hours with approval from the local superintendent.”[3]
As a result, 10 p.m. is the busiest hour in Daechi-dong: more than ten thousand students pour out of the buildings, while countless parents arrive in expensive cars to pick up their children. Yet unofficially, lessons continue late into the night—sometimes until four in the morning.
One of the more recent controversies in this area involved “fourth-year exams, seventh-year exams,”—tests in English and mathematics administered to children who are, in fact, only three, six years old. It is common to see children who look no older than six or seven pulling small rolling suitcases, the kind used for travel, as they move from one hagwon to another.
These institutions own hundreds of buildings, manage millions of students, and extract enormous profits from this structure. Most people have no real sense of how much money this system generates—how much it costs to operate, or how extensively it is managed. According to one study, households spend an average of 660,000 KRW (approximately 500 USD) per month on private tutoring, and 86.1 percent of students attend hagwon classes each year.[4]
The overall market value of the private education industry is estimated at 25 billion USD. When tuition fees are combined with meal costs, shuttle bus fees, and textbook expenses, the total monthly cost can reach 2 to 3 million KRW per child. Despite these high costs, competition for admission remains intense because many programs operate with extremely limited enrollment.[5]
It is common to see thousands of high school students, repeat takers, and long-term test-preppers lining up in the streets to register for lectures taught by famous instructors—most of whom are affiliated with corporate-scale hagwons, such as Dawon, SDIJ, and DUGAK (Daesung).
Ironically, within fifteen minutes, you can go from the pressure-filled streets of Daechi-dong to COEX and the InterContinental Seoul Parnas, where the city performs its polished, consumer-friendly face. While you move through public transportation between these two worlds, you may encounter a familiar public service announcement.
“There are no pills for better study performance.” This public announcement emerged in response to the increasing misuse of ADHD medications—such as methylphenidate and atomoxetine—by students attempting to enhance academic performance. According to the National Health Insurance Service, Gangnam-gu alone contains 159 licensed medical institutions that include, or are exclusively composed of, departments of psychiatry.[6]
The Beginning
Significantly, I am also someone who benefited from the traditional South Korean education system. As a result, it may appear contradictory to indict a system that has, in part, constituted me; yet it is precisely from within such contradictions that a clearer critique becomes possible.
You may ask, “How could this system be considered beneficial?” To respond to this question, we must acknowledge that the system operates with a near-totalizing efficiency, absorbing the child into a regime of discipline where time, desire, and even identity are meticulously regulated.
For a more concrete example, I began studying English in my second year of high school, preparing for the TOEFL as proof of proficiency for U.S. university admission. My initial score was only around ten across the four sections. Nevertheless, by the end of my third year, I had raised it to over 80—meeting the typical requirement for undergraduate study in the United States.
This rapid improvement was not the result of linguistic immersion, but of South Korea’s highly optimized private education system, which compresses years of study into months.
Prior research argue that "These results indicate that private education influences not only academic performance but also the choice of educational pathways. In particular, students whose target university level rises through private education tend to opt for reattempting admissions or avoid lower-tier alternatives.[7]"
Nevertheless, I want to begin by acknowledging that within that same system, I was never considered a successful student. Throughout middle and high school, I usually received E grades—the lowest grade a student can receive in the South Korean education system.
My early educational path began with athletics at the age of six, entirely by my own choice. I still remember the moment clearly: I saw Yuna Kim on television, gliding across the ice with an ease that felt almost unreal, and I thought to myself, I want to try that too.
As most people might expect, private sports lessons—especially those taught by instructors at places like the Olympic Sports Center—are extremely expensive.
Nevertheless, my educational experience soon expanded into other athletic and artistic fields; by the age of seven, I had begun learning fine art, ballet, and the cello. Even now, I remain grateful to my parents for giving me the practical resources that made those early experiences possible.
It was a simple beginning, almost naive in retrospect, but it was mine. My first step in that journey began at the Bundang Olympic Sports Center ice rink. And once again, I must emphasize: all of this began of my own will.
I loved many things about the ice rink, but the most unforgettable was the smell rising from beneath it—the damp, rubbery scent that clung to the floors and my skates. I remember the first moment I met my figure-skating coach: she lifted me effortlessly into the air and carried me around the rink in a full lap, as if introducing me to an entirely new world.
Playing the cello began for me at age six, during my pre-K years. I remember starting with the Shinichi Suzuki textbook—the first method through which I learned to hold the instrument, draw a sound from it, and understand what music might mean.
I have some memories about fine art experience, I still have a contact with my art teacher at this periods. She trained at USA, and UK art schools. I experienced with using variety of materials; as my teacher’s intend, I have some memory about using pastels. Inks, paint, graphite, charcoal, and copper engraving.
I genuinely loved all of it—playing sports, making art, and learning music—simply because it felt like the beginning of everything for me. And to digress for a moment, I also loved science around that time—not in any rigorous or academic sense, but because of the imaginative charm it carried. In truth, I just thought it looked cool.
In the Republic of Korea, preparation for college entrance begins as early as pre-kindergarten—even for students aiming for fine-arts programs such as painting, sculpture, or musical performance. My mother majored in piano performance during her bachelor’s degree, and her educational path represented a kind of standard model for students pursuing music in South Korea.
She attended Sunhwa Arts Middle School, then Sunhwa Arts High School, and later graduated from Chugye University for the Arts. After I began learning the cello, she evaluated me—through her own experience and perspective—to see whether I might be able to major in it someday. During that period, she may have suspected I was experiencing ADHD.
What the System Measures
Nowadays, much of this academic machinery operates almost exclusively to produce medical-school candidates. The CSAT has long abandoned its original pedagogical purpose and has devolved into a centrally administered apparatus of stratification—a gatekeeping mechanism for medical colleges that determines life trajectories through quantification rather than understanding.
The CSAT compose with following sections: Korean, English, Mathematics, Korean History, and Selective Section; Social Science, Natural Science, and Profession. This criterion produces a purely merit-based grading structure—one that inevitably places one student at the top and another at the bottom, all according to a highly generalized and rigid standard. The CSAT reports four types of scores: the raw score, the standardized score, the percentile, and the final grade.
The grade scale is determined by percentile cutoffs of 4%, 11%, 23%, 40%, 60%, 77%, 89%, 96%, and 100%. Using the official standardized scores, institutions can calculate a student’s precise national ranking in each subject, as well as determine the relative difficulty of each subject for that year.
Some readers might compare it to the MCAT, but the contrast is stark: the MCAT is intended for adults who have already completed a university education, while the CSAT is imposed on adolescents who are barely beginning to understand themselves.
Sardonically, Fairness, often cited as the moral foundation of contemporary education, is rendered into a narrow calculus of labor and memorization. It measures how many hours a student can dedicate to memorizing information and how accurately they can reproduce it afterward.
Prior research argues that the CSAT Korean section has lost the criteria for defining reading and logical comprehension ability, which represents a severe imbalance that the test itself admits to.[8]
Similarly, the English section does not accurately represent the level of English proficiency expected in secondary and higher education. It is commonly recognized that English education provided through the public education system—from elementary and secondary schools to universities—falls far short of cultivating the English skills actually needed when students enter society.[9]
In the mathematics and science sections, the problems are even more severe: they no longer resemble genuine mathematical or scientific inquiry. What remains is merely a repetitive cycle of input and output, executed exactly as instructed. Most CSAT problems and textbooks obsess over excessively convoluted computations, while offering almost no room for mathematical philosophy or conceptual reflection.
For instance, the consequences of this educational objective become evident when examining Question 20 from the 2022 CSAT Biology II exam. Dr. Jonathan K. Pritchard, a professor in the Departments of Genetics and Biology at Stanford University, has publicly stated that this question is logically incoherent.[10]
Despite such a clear error in the item—and despite criticism from the academic community—the Korea Institute of Curriculum & Evaluation insisted that the question contained no flaw, which sparked widespread controversy.[11]
Success and Education
Chapter one may be too heavy for some readers; if so, feel free to close this book and take a moment to clear your mind.
Now, I want to turn briefly to my perspective as a scholar in my twenties who actually lived through this environment. So what, then, is a “successful student” in this system and what exactly is this educational factory trying to cultivate?
Before continuing, I want to pause briefly to consider what we mean by success and education. The dictionary defines success as “the fact of achieving something good that you have been trying to do.[12]” Likewise, it describes education as “the process of teaching and learning …”[13]
Many people devote their lives to becoming what they believe to be “successful,” and from a humanistic historical perspective, education has long been regarded as one of humanity’s most powerful tools—an instrument that allows civilization to be preserved, transformed, and passed forward as we evolve. Yet these familiar definitions raise a deeper question: what are success and education, in their essence?
My understanding of this concept has been shaped largely by the writings of Plato, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In this book, I propose the following working definitions:
a) Education is the process through which teaching and learning enable the formation of personal capacity and direction.
b) Personal success refers to the attainment of a good—particularly the good of study—that an individual pursues in the hope of creating a better life.
Let us return to the most classical understanding of success and study as described by Plato. If we begin from the concept of success implied in the Theory of Ideas, then study becomes, at its core, a self-investigative journey—a movement of the soul toward clarity. In The Republic, education is not merely the accumulation of information but the turning of the mind toward the light, a slow and deliberate ascent away from shadows.
Placed against this ideal, what then are we to make of an educational system that demands not ascent but repetition?
Freud offers another insight: that the ego is shaped through the negotiation of desire, prohibition, and internalized authority. If education becomes a mechanism of excessive discipline—an instrument that replaces inquiry with obedience—then the child learns not to understand the world but to suppress the parts of themselves that fail to conform to it.
Kant, too, reminds us that autonomy is the hallmark of maturity. Education, in its highest sense, should cultivate the capacity for self-governance—the ability to act according to principles one has reasoned and endorsed. Yet in systems like the one I grew up in, heteronomy prevails: the student acts not from reason but from coercion, from rankings, from fear of falling behind.
And Nietzsche, finally, speaks of the will to power not as domination of others but as the unfolding of one’s own becoming. If success is reduced to a percentile score or a narrow professional pathway, then this generative force is stifled long before it has a chance to emerge. What remains is not a thriving individual but a disciplined subject—trained, measured, and exhausted.
Taken together, these extended concepts complicate the question of success. They suggest that true education must cultivate freedom, clarity, and self-formation. But contemporary South Korean education, as I experienced it, operates on an entirely different logic. It evaluates without understanding, ranks without reflection, and rewards conformity over curiosity.
Success and education—two of the most meaningful pursuits in human life—have been compressed into a thin and fragile metric. What we call “failure,” then, may not be the collapse of the student, but the collapse of a system that no longer remembers what it exists to do.
And this is where my story continues.
[1] Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS). “Private Education Institution Registry.” National Education Information System (NEIS). Accessed December 10, 2025. https://open.neis.go.kr/portal/data/service/selectServicePage.do?page=1&rows=10&sortColumn=&sortDirection=&infId=OPEN19220231012134453534385&infSeq=1.
[2] National Assembly of the Republic of Korea. “The Article of Establish Hagwon, Operation and Teaching.” National Law Information Center. Accessed December 10, 2025. https://www.law.go.kr/법령/학원의설립ㆍ운영및과외교습에관한법률.
[3] Seoul Metropolitan Council. “Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education Ordinance on the Establishment and Operation of Private Educational Institutes and Extracurricular Lessons.” National Law Information Center. Accessed December 10, 2025. https://www.law.go.kr/LSW//ordinInfoP.do?ordinSeq=2037335&chrClsCd=010202&gubun=.
[4] Eun Chul Choi and In Seong Lee. “The Status and Demand Analysis of Private Education Consumption in Korea: Focusing on Price Elasticity by Household Income.” The Journal of Learner-Centered Curriculum and Instruction 25, no. 14 (2025): 45–57. https://doi.org/10.22251/jlcci.2025.25.14.45.
[5] Jiwon Lee. “1980s Chaebol 2018 GAPJIL 2025 Hagwon: Fourth Year Exams, the Sad Shadow.” The Scoop, no. 660 (July 2025): 18–22.
[6] National Health Insurance Service (NHIS). “Find a Hospital.” Accessed December 10, 2025. http://www.nhis.or.kr/nhis/healthin/retrieveMdcAdminSknsClinic.do.
[7] Sanguk Nam and Kookdong Kim. “Analysis of the Correlation between Private Education and University Admission Choices.” The Journal of Educational Development 45, no. 2 (2025): 467–87. https://doi.org/10.34245/jed.45.2.467.
[8] Ryu Su-yeol, "Critical Examination About CSAT Korean Language and Its Developmental Directions: Toward the Recovery of the Nature of the CSAT Evaluation," Sae Gugeo Gyoyuk (New Korean Language Education) 121 (December 2019): 353-380, https://doi.org/10.15734/koed..121.201912.353.
[9] Yong-won Lee and Sumi Han, "CSAT English Grades and College Scholastic Abilities: A Survey of College Students' Perceptions," English Language and Literature 21 34, no. 4 (December 2021): 419-452.
[10] Jonathan Pritchard [@jkpritch]. “A fantastic popgen odyssey by @aguirre404, prompted by a Hardy-Weinberg question in the ‘Korean SAT’. This story has it all: popgen, a high stakes college entrance exam, a mathematical paradox, and a court injunction:” Tweet. Twitter, December 11, 2021. https://x.com/jkpritch/status/1469466722583265282.
[11] NAMYEONG KIM. “[Exclusive] Academic Society Consulted by Test Authority Concludes: ‘CSAT Biology II Contains an Error.’” The Korea Economic Daily. Accessed December 11, 2025. https://n.news.naver.com/mnews/article/015/0004639562?sid=102.
[12] “Success,” Cambridge Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, accessed November 30, 2025).
[13] "Education," Cambridge Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, accessed November 24, 2025).