Exploring ways to revitalize public education and reduce private education costs to increase fertility rate in Korea: Focusing on Sweden Education Introduction
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Lee Ju-Eun 
Published: April 2019

South Korea is the lowest birthrate in the world with only 0.95 total fertility rate in the third quarter of 2018. In order to solve these problems, the Korean government has been supporting huge budget and trying to solve the problem, but it has not been effective and has become increasingly serious problem of low fertility. The academic community has also studied various causes of such low fertility problems in Korea. There have been a number of studies that have examined the relationship between child education costs and low fertility rates, and there have been a number of studies on the issue of private education costs and low birth rates among child education expenses. As a result of these studies, there was a negative effect between private education costs and childbirth. In addition, there have been researches that private education is expanding in the situation where public education is at risk due to various reasons, and private education expenses are further increased. However, there is little research on ways to stimulate public education, reduce private tutoring costs, and increase fertility rates. In this paper, we examined the current status and problems of Korean education in general and sought to find a solution. For this purpose, I refer to Swedish education. The research method was carefully reviewed and analyzed in the preceding articles and various academic materials. As a result of the study, problems of Korean education could be divided into public education and private education. First of all, the problems of public education were firstly anxiety of students and parents because of frequent education revision. As a result, public education faced a crisis of losing trust. Second, the main role of education disappears in the entrance examination - oriented education field and it is a problem of the memorization class which injects only the simple answer for the entrance examination of the prestigious school. Third, competition and order are more important than cooperation, which hinders integrated education and deprives the economically marginalized in the discriminative environment. Fourth, the students were deprived of the opportunity to develop aptitude and creativity, self - directed learning ability, self-determination ability, and social development in a rigid and uniformized infant education environment. Fifth, education and academic-centered accidents were prevalent in the education field, which forced them to pay excessive private education expenses to enter a prestigious university. As a result, the unemployment rate of highly educated workers is increasing due to the over-supply of highly educated workers in the industrial field. Sixth, there is a serious problem in the physical and mental health of students in the educational environment where there is no rest and leisure. The problems of private tutoring are as follows: First, they stimulate polarization of spending on private education expenses by parents’ socioeconomic ability, foster fierce competition and justify discrimination, and promote deprivation and loss feeling in economically marginalized class. Second, preliminary learning led to the collapse of the classroom by encouraging students to lose their interest in school classes and sleep. Third, by only injecting and memorizing the test answers for college entrance examination, it inhibited the development of the whole period of youth and promoted the phenomenon of human robotization. Fourth, it instigated students and parents unconditionally serious anxiety and attracted huge amount of private education expenses.