https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comm ... n_suicide/
"You spend your first ~20-25 years doing nothing but studying, and then you enter a job market where your work hours may leave you unable to even go home and sleep in your bed for 3 hours a night(more, if you're lucky).
---I'm a teacher in Korea. Let me give you a rundown of a typical student's day.
Get up at 6:30 and go to school by 8. In school until 3 ish. Go from school straight to their first hagwon (cram school) of the day. Go from hagwon to hagwon until 10pm (it would be later but they actually made it illegal for hagwons to stay open past 10 and even have an enforcement squad that raids ones operating illegally). From there they go home and do homework until midnight or even later. Sleep and do it again tomorrow. Saturday? Oh no you study. No free time for you. We just finished summer intensive classes here. What those are is during summer vacation we can't just let them have a break. There's no school so instead the kids are sent to extra hagwon classes in the morning. You ask the kids what they did over the weekend? "I studied". No what did you do for fun? "sleep"
etc. I remember thinking I had it bad until I spent two weeks in Shanghai on exchange - kids there have school lunches *and* school dinners, because lessons take up the entire day. But South Korea seems even worse.
I feel really bad for all those kids. I was lucky as it is - I breezed through most of my classes because I is smart, so I only had tuition classes for Chinese, plus swimming and piano; most of my classmates had tuition for every subject. I had extra Chinese remedial lessons (I was in the remedial class *for* the remedial class, because my Chinese was horrific) before school and during recess, so I didn't even get recess. School vacation was a misnomer because there were extra classes throughout, plus hours of band practice every day when I joined my school band, and most of the remaining hours were packed with homework. On weekends I might have a few hours to play before going back to homework, and I often spent classes covertly writing fan fiction or composing poetry about blowing up the school. I had a lot more free time than most of my peers because I'm one of those annoying people who ace exams without studying. Even with that, I was already extremely stressed because the workload was insane. Quite a few kids here kill themselves because they can't cope, or because they get less than perfect scores on examinations and are too afraid to face their parents. I'm really grateful for my parents right now.
I have much respect for any student in South Korea who manages to survive their education system.
University was great, though. I slacked off all the way and still managed to graduate with honours. Apparently that's also the case in Japan and South Korea, where once they get into university they can finally relax; at least until they graduate and enter the working world.
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