Korean Schools Closing Because of the Low Birthrate

The whole Turnbull family (all 2.5 of us) will be catching a plane to Hong Kong and then Australia in 7 hours, so naturally I’ve been enjoying my last morning in Korea by…surfing the internet all morning. In my defence, it will be a whole 2 days or so before I’m able to set up the laptop at my Dad’s place, and as soon as I finish this post I’ll be going jogging - it’s quite sunny out there. Nice day to catch a flight.

( Source: unknown )

In the meantime, the morning wasn’t completely wasted because I found this article in the Korea Times that says that, as of March this year, 32% of elementary schools have shut down because of the country’s low birthrate. While I’ve said on many occasions that Korea’s low birthrate is arguably Korea’s most pressing economic and social problem, but that the government seems to lack a sense of urgency about it (see here too), even I didn’t expect so many schools to shut so quickly. More likely is that most of those schools should have been closed down some time ago, but only now has someone in the Education Ministry had the gumption to do so.

One unintended positive side-effect of the falling numbers is the falling teacher-student ratio. The Korea Herald had an article on that back in September which I pasted onto my blog here before it became subscriber-only at the Herald (and there was much rejoicing), and back in November I also found but didn’t post about (sorry) this article in the JoongAng Daily entitled As birthrate falls, so does the number of students, but fortunately it’s still available online. One thing I’m surprised to read in that is that despite the falling student numbers the number of teachers hired has still gone up, reducing the teacher-student ratio still further and easing competition for highly sought-after elementary school teaching jobs especially (see here for more information on their salaries too).

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