KOREA EDUCATION

 
Read the paragraph below and fill in the missing words.
The anxious moments before a college entrance exam in Seoul
Parents in Seoul pray for their children and grandchildren taking exams

 The results of the international school tests - known as Pisa tests - are to be published by the OECD on Tuesday. In previous years, South Korea has been one of the highest achievers.

Hye-Min Park is 16 and lives in the Seoul district of Gangnam, made famous by the pop star Psy. Her day is typical of that of the majority of South Korean teenagers.She at 6.30am, is at school by 8am, finishes at 4pm, (or 5pm if she has a club), then back home to eat.She then takes a bus to her second school shift of the day, at a crammer or hagwon, where she has lessons from 6pm until 9pm.She spends two hours in what she calls self-study back at school, before arriving home after 11pm. She goes to bed at 2am, and rises in the morning at 6.30am to do it all over again.

She says she would like to get more sleep but it's her job to it. To get the qualifications to follow her dream career a teacher she has to work hard she says, and she likes studying, and learning new things.Hye-Min's mother Yoon-Gyeong Hwang says she worries about her daughter, but they have no choice when it comes to to compete.

This relentless on education has resulted in formidable exam performers. It's the sort of performance that makes education ministers in the UK and beyond look on with envy, and has them actively remodelling the curriculum and exams to try to emulate them.

The investment in education has also resulted in an economy that's grown at an astonishing rate since the end of the war with North Korea 60 years ago.

South Korea has in two generations gone from mass illiteracy to being an economic powerhouse.But it's come at a big cost. The relentless pressure means Korea another much less enviable record, that of having the highest suicide rate of industrialised OECD countries.

It's a price the country is now gradually starting to weigh up.

AFFLUENT

ALTHOUGH

ANOTHER

AS

BESIDES

FOCUS

HUGE

LIKE

HAVING

 

OVERCOME

HOLDS

 

POPS

HOWEVER

 

PRIVATE

INVESTMENT

 

RISES

Adapted from BBC Education and family

 

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