Top Teachers Become Multimillionaires in South Korea

Clasping his headphones and closing his eyes as he sang into the studio microphone while performing a peppy duet with one of South Korea’s hottest actresses, spiky-haired Cha Kil-yong looked every bit the K-pop star.

But Cha is not a singer or actor. No, he’s a unique kind of South Korean celebrity: a teaching star.

And the song he was singing with Clara, a Korean mega celebrity, in a music video that wouldn’t be out of place on MTV? It was called “SAT jackpot!”

In this education-obsessed country, Cha is a top-ranked math teacher. But he doesn’t teach in a school. He runs an online “hagwon” — or cram school — called SevenEdu that focuses entirely on preparing students to take the college entrance exam in mathematics.

Here, teaching pays: Cha said he earned a cool $8 million last year.

“I’m madly in love with math,” said Cha, looking the height of trendiness in his crimson shirt and pants and tweed jacket, in his office in Gangnam — a wealthy part of Seoul famous for its conspicuous consumption and featured in the song “Gangnam Style.”

It’s hard to exaggerate the premium South Korea places on education. This is a society in which you have to get into the right kindergarten, so that you can get into the right elementary school, then into the right middle school and high school, and finally into the right college. Which, of course, gets you the right job and scores you the right spouse.

There’s even a phrase to describe the Korean version of a helicopter mother: “chima baram” — literally “skirt wind,” to describe the swish as a mother rushes into the classroom to demand a front-row seat for her child or to question grades.

Many Korean families split and live on opposite sides of the world in pursuit of a better education: The mother and children live in the United States or some other English-speaking country, the better to secure entry to a prestigious university (preferably Harvard). The “goose father” continues working in South Korea, flying in to visit when he can.

All of this combines to make South Korea’s equivalent of the SAT the most important event in a young person’s life.

As such, the vast majority of teenagers here do a double shift at school: They attend normal classes by day but go to hagwons for after-hours study. Increasingly, online hagwons are replacing traditional brick-and-mortar cram schools. The hagwons have become a $20 billion industry. (washingtonpost.com)