Education in South Korea - Secondary Education - Middle School

Middle School

Middle schools in South Korea consist of three grades. Most students enter at age 12 or 13 and graduate at age 15 or 16 (western years). These three grades correspond roughly to grades 7-9 in the North American system and Years 8-10 in England and Wales's system.

Middle school in South Korea marks a considerable shift from elementary school, with students expected to take studies and school much more seriously. At most middle schools regulation uniforms and haircuts are enforced fairly strictly, and some aspects of students' lives are highly controlled. Like in elementary school, students spend most of the day in the same homeroom classroom with the same classmates; however, students have different teachers for each subject. Teachers move around from classroom to classroom, and few teachers apart from those who teach special subjects have their own rooms to which students come. Homeroom teachers (담임선생님 dam im seonsangnim) play a very important role in students' lives.

Most middle school students take six lessons a day, and in addition to this usually have an early morning block that precedes regular lessons and a seventh lesson specialising in an extra subject to finish the day. Unlike with high school, middle school curricula do not vary much from school to school. Maths, English, Korean, social studies, and science form the core subjects, with students also receiving instruction in music, art, PE, history, ethics, home economics, technology, and Hanja. What subjects students study and in what amount may vary from year to year. All regular lessons are 45 minutes long. Before school, students have an extra block, 30-or-more minutes long, that may be used for self-study, watching Educational Broadcast System (EBS) broadcasts, or for personal or class administration. Beginning in 2008, students attended school from Monday to Friday, and had a half-day every 1st, 3rd, and 5th (calendar permitting) Saturday of the month. Saturday lessons usually included Club Activity (CA) lessons, where students could participate in extracurricular activities. However, from 2012 onwards, primary and secondary schools, including middle schools, will no longer hold Saturday classes.

In the late 1960s the government abolished entrance examinations for middle school students, replacing it with a system whereby elementary school students within the same district are selected for middle schools by a lottery system. This has the effect of equalising the quality of students from school to school, though schools in areas where students come from more privileged backgrounds still tend to outperform schools in poorer areas. Until recently most middle schools have been same-sex, though in the past decade most new middle schools have been mixed, and some previously same-sex schools have converted to mixed as well.

As with elementary schools, students pass from grade to grade regardless of knowledge or academic achievement, the result being that classes often have students of vastly differing abilities learning the same subject material together. In the final year of middle school examination scores become very important for the top students hoping to gain entrance into the top high schools, and for those in the middle hoping to get into an academic rather than a technical or vocation high school. Otherwise, examinations and marks only matter insofar as living up to a self-enforced concept of position in the school ranking system. There are some standardised examinations for certain subjects, and teachers of academic subjects are expected to follow approved textbooks, but generally middle school teachers have more flexibility over curricula and methods than teachers at high school.

Many middle school students also attend after-school academies, known as hagwon, and some receive extra instruction from private tutors. The core subjects, especially the cumulative subjects of English and maths, receive the most stress. Some hagwon specialise in just one subject, and others offer all core subjects, constituting a second round of schooling every day for their pupils. Indeed, some parents place more stress on their children's hagwon studies than their public school studies. Additionally, many students attend academies for things such as martial arts or music. The result of all this is that many middle school students, like their high school counterparts, return from a day of schooling well after sunset.