Korean Education. The Korean System. It Can Change.

Sometimes I regret living in a society where people who have thought deeply about their own lives are rare. The “defeat in life” I'm speaking of doesn't mean failing to earn money or to enter a good university. If anything, by such external standards Korea is close to the country that has pursued success most ferociously in the world. According to the OECD, Korea's tertiary attainment rate among 25–34-year-olds is 71%, far above the OECD average of 48% and the highest among member countries. The share of 25–34-year-olds who did not even finish high school is a mere 1%. Almost everyone, quite literally, has studied for years, taken the exams, stacked up credentials. (OECD)

Yet strange data emerges at the same time. In the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, Koreans aged 16–65 scored below the OECD average in literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem solving alike. In adaptive problem solving in particular, 37% of adults were at Level 1 or below versus an OECD average of 29%, and only 1% of Koreans reached Level 4 — the top level, where one can reassess a problem and revise strategy when unexpected change occurs — against an OECD average of 5%. More importantly, this cannot be dismissed as merely an older-generation problem: Koreans aged 16–24 scored above the OECD average in literacy but below it in adaptive problem solving. (OECD)

The OECD's 2026 Economic Survey of Korea makes the point more bluntly. It assesses that Korean students' enormous educational investment is concentrated on raising university entrance scores, and that this fails to sufficiently develop critical thinking and self-directed learning. The OECD recommended reducing dependence on high-stakes testing and shifting a structure overly focused on book learning toward real experience and self-directed learning. (OECD)

It is exactly here that I think about the “absence of philosophy.” Of course, these statistics do not directly measure whether Koreans engage in philosophical reflection, and I don't want to overstate them that way. But the fact that we pour staggering time and money into education and hold world-leading credentials, while adult capacity to define and respond to changing problems fails to keep pace — that fact at least forces the question of what we have actually been teaching. We spent years and years learning “what is the correct answer,” but comparatively little time training to ask: “why do I consider this the correct answer?”, “what do I want?”, “what is a good life?”, “is the standard I'm following actually mine?”

The outcome is strange too. Over the past thirty years Korea has grown far richer, lives longer, and pushed education to the world's highest levels. Yet the OECD's 2026 comprehensive report on Korean well-being shows average life satisfaction at 6.4 out of 10 in 2023, below the OECD average of 7.3. The share who say they have friends or family to rely on in hard times was about 80% in Korea versus roughly 90% across the OECD. The OECD's assessment: Korea has achieved great material and educational progress, but life satisfaction, mental and emotional well-being, and social connection still leave much room for improvement. (OECD)

So when I occasionally look at Korea and feel it resembles “a nation of life's defeated,” I don't mean there are many poor people. The opposite. It looks like a society that solved the problems society assigned more diligently than anyone, yet rarely ever defined the problem of its own life. People chase the external answer sheet — good university, good job, good apartment, high salary — with everything they have, while thinking little about what they truly want, why they live, what relationships they want to build with whom, and what success even is.

And people who have never conversed enough with themselves become parents, teachers, managers, executives, and bureaucrats, handing the same answer key to the next person. “This is how it's done.” “Everyone else does it.” “You have to reach at least this much to count as a success.” Ask why, and what comes out is not logic but custom. And so the system reproduces itself unchanged across generations.

That is what I find most regrettable. Not a society of low education, but a highly educated society short on philosophy; not a society that didn't study, but one that never studied itself enough. Even the OECD stresses that future education must help adolescents form identity and purpose and build the capacity for self-reflection and independent choice. In an era when AI retrieves knowledge for us and generates endless candidate answers, this capacity can only grow more important. (OECD)

In the end, what decides victory or defeat in a life may not be the score you received on a test someone else designed. Have you, even once in your life, questioned yourself all the way to the end? Have you built your own answers to who you are, what you love, what you will live for? I believe that is the far more important problem in a person's life.

And if a society becomes one where people who never think these things through form the majority and impose life's “correct answers” on one another, then however high its credentials and however good its technology, I find it hard to call that society healthy.

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