hankyoreh

By Um Ji-won and Park Soo-jin, staff reporter

Two girls dressed in their school uniforms laughed as they walked along a cherry blossom-strewn road. They looked to be the best of friends. To their left was an eleven-line message printed on a stationery background. “Now that the new semester has started,” it read, “you’ll have a lot more time to hang out with people. It seems reasonable to want to build your friendships. But every time you do that, the studying you planned to do gets put off another day. What are you going to do? The college entrance exam date isn‘t going anywhere.”

This ad from the 2013 campaign for Megastudy, a major test prep institute, concludes with the warning, “Don’t let yourself be pulled astray. Friends don’t study for you.”

With the new semester set to start next week, the ad was plastered all over Seoul’s buses as of Feb. 26. Many students have been sent links to it from friends on the internet. “@Tiffanis****,” an internet user who identified as a teenager, tweeted that the “friendship destruction ad” was already the talk of their school.

“They’re trying to give young people a complex about it, telling them they need to ditch their friends if they want to do well on the test,” said Cho Sang-sik, an education professor at Dongguk University.

Young people are already losing friends to the entrance exam race as it is. According to a 2011 report by the National Youth Policy Institute, South Korea ranked 35th out of 36 countries on a scale rating young people’s social interaction capabilities. In particular, it earned zero marks in the categories of “relationship-orientedness” and “social cooperation.” The figures paint a stark portrait of a decline in the ability to form meaningful peer group relationships.

Data from an April 2012 study of 260,000 elementary, middle, and high school students by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education provides more troubling news. High school students averaged 3.20 out of 5.0 points on a question rating their satisfaction with their relationship with friends. This was more than one point lower than for elementary students (4.42) or middle school students (4.24). As the entrance exam competition gets under way, students seem to be viewing their classmates not as friends, but as rivals.

Lee Yeong-tak, a teacher at Surak Middle School in Seoul, said friendship at school is a way of learning the things that are truly essential in life.

“The values emphasized in education should be cooperation and teamwork,” Lee said. “Even if your goal is to get into a higher-level school, you need to have good marks in convergence and integrated classes where you‘re interacting with friends.”

The background of this advertisement is the distorted educational environment.

“What this advertisement is doing is advocating breaking off human relationships as a test prep strategy,” said Prof. Cho Sang-shik. “This shows two things: the place our education is at right now, and the way students and their parents see their schools as a way of getting into a better high school or university.”

This is not the first time an “anti-education” ad from a private education firm has touched off a furor. In 2008, Daekyo aired a commercial, set to the tune of the popular song “A Letter from a Private,” in which a newly admitted elementary school student was seen reacting with the solemn expression of someone receiving a draft notice. The current educational environment, and its emphasis on competition, is leading to a proliferation of such advertisements.

Megastudy explained that it decided to use the theme of friendship in encouraging young people to study hard in the new semester because they thought it would resonate most strongly.

“It’s part of an advertising campaign,” the company explained. “We hope you understand what our intentions were.”

But Kim Seung-hyeon, the policy bureau chief for the group A Worth Without Private Education Worries, blasted the advertisement‘s approach, saying it “defies common sense to exploit students’ insecurities in that way.”

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]