The OECD on Tuesday announced a study on the educational conditions among its 30 member nations and said Korea ranked third in terms of the share of public education spending compared to GDP in 2005. Public education in Korea accounted for 7.2 percent of GDP, compared to top-ranked Iceland (8 percent) and second-ranked Denmark (7.4 percent). That amount combines the Korean government's W34.85 trillion education budget plus the W23.5 trillion (US$1=W1,101) parents spent on public school tuition and teaching materials. The average amount of public spending in the OECD was 5.8 percent of GDP.
Finland, which spent 6 percent of GDP on public education according to the OECD survey, ranked first in science and second in mathematics and reading in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in December last year. It also ranked first for three consecutive years from 2003 through 2005 in the World Economic Forum's international competitiveness evaluation. There the government pays for classes, food and even study materials. Private educational spending effectively doesnĄ¯t exist. Korea's competitiveness in terms of education, by contrast, ranked 35th out of 55 countries in a survey by Switzerland's International Institute for Management and Development.

If you consider the huge private educational costs shouldered by Korean parents, our educational spending is the highest in the world. The government estimates private educational spending in Korea to be W20.04 trillion, while the Hyundai Economic Research Institute puts it at W33.5 trillion. That's just around 10 percent of GDP.

According to research by the education ministry, 88 percent of elementary school students, 78 percent of middle school students and 63 percent of high school students attend private crammers. And on top of that, more than 300,000 Korean elementary, middle and high school students go overseas each year to study. If the quality of education is determined by the amount of money spent on private crammers, it is inevitable for a gap between the rich and poor to manifest itself in the field of education, forcing children to inherit poverty in terms of schooling as well.

Yet Korean parents are in the unenviable position of having to send their children to private crammers because of the poor quality of public education, even though Korea's public school spending is the highest in the world. At the same time, Korean education is failing to keep abreast with global competition, while income disparities are being directly transferred to the realm of education, forcing the children of poor families to receive poor education. This leads to a vicious cycle of poor families passing on poverty to their children. The only solution is to improve the quality of public education in Korea.

Source: english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200809/200809100023.html