He can’t be older than thirteen. Anyone who has spent time in Seoul, Daegu, or Busan is familiar with the rhythm of scenes like this, which recur every night. Children learn. Parents hold off. The city is buzzing with ambition and caffeine.

By most international standards, South Korean students are exceptional. They routinely outperform international math, science, and reading standards and are ranked ninth in the world for overall academic achievement. Teachers from overseas travel here to observe the operation of the system. However, there is a contradiction that is difficult to overlook in the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family’s 2025 Youth Statistics report, which was made public this week.

Eighty-seven percent of these students report feeling physically well. They get 7.3 hours of sleep every night on average. However, 42.3% of middle and high school students report experiencing regular stress, a five percentage point increase in just one year. Additionally, 27.7% report having depressive symptoms.

It’s easy to portray this as a contemporary issue, the result of college admissions algorithms and smartphones. A portion of that narrative is supported by data on phone dependency, which shows that 42.6 percent of teenagers are currently considered to be at risk of overdependence, an alarming 12.4 percent increase since 2019. However, the pressure itself is not new. It is old—possibly even ancient.

Academic achievement became a family’s lifeline with the introduction of the Gwageo civil service examination in the late fourteenth century during the Joseon Dynasty. If you didn’t succeed, you stayed a farmer. You became a member of the ruling class after passing. That reasoning never really vanished. It simply switched outfits.

Observing Korean teenagers today gives the impression that they are still taking the exam, albeit it has been twelve years. Jinwon Yoon, a middle school student whose schedule has been reported in local media, spends nearly all of her day in class: wake up, eat, go to school, hagwon, have dinner, study, and go to bed. Do it again. In Korea, 77% of fifteen-year-olds go to private tutoring after school. Weekdays blend into weekends. Friendships are either not scheduled at all or are scheduled in between sessions.

It is now more difficult to conceal the human cost of this. Suicide continues to be the most common cause of death for teenagers in Korea, a statistic that stands in stark contrast to the nation’s impressive PISA rankings. Even in cases where schools had identified warning signs, the majority of students who committed suicide had never received psychiatric treatment, according to a study based on Ministry of Education data from 2016 to 2020. It seems that there is still a huge gap between realizing a child is having difficulties and providing them with assistance.

Here, parents are not bad people. The majority are byproducts of the same system, pushing their kids in the direction of the same brass ring they used to chase because they think—sometimes correctly—that there isn’t a safer route. I’ve spoken to mothers in Seoul who talk about feeling guilty about pushing too hard or not pushing hard enough.

There is no easy way out of this trap. The youth population itself is rapidly declining, from nearly 14 million in 1985 to 7.63 million today, and is predicted to drop below 3.3 million by 2070, indicating that the trap is tightening. Each child is under more pressure when there are fewer of them.

What could cause the grip to loosen? In order to replicate a Monday through Friday work schedule, some educators advocate reducing the school and tutoring week to five days. Others want more real funding for extracurricular activities unrelated to grades, such as sports, music, and the kind of aimless afternoons that were once common.

Whether any government has the political guts to confront the hagwon industry, which has evolved into something akin to a shadow education system, is still up for debate. For the time being, Gangnam’s lights remain on, and the boy in the navy uniform, with a textbook tucked under his arm, waits for his mother while speculating about the ultimate purpose of all of this.

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