I wake up at 5:30 a.m., a ritual I have performed since middle school. My body moves on autopilot—shower, uniform, breakfast, shoes—each step executed with the precision of a well-trained soldier. By 6:30, I am on the bus, jostling for space with other students, all of us bound for the same destination: a day of academic warfare.
School begins at 8:00 a.m. and runs until 4:00 p.m., but that is just the warm-up. There is no time to breathe, no room for curiosity, no space for the simple joy of learning. The classrooms are packed, the air thick with exhaustion. Teachers speak quickly, their words like bullets we must dodge and absorb at the same time. My textbooks are marked with desperate scribbles, my notes filled with the same equations and vocabulary drills over and over again. In class, I am not a student—I am a test-taking machine, calibrated for the singular purpose of scoring higher than the person sitting next to me. My classmates are my competitors, my enemies in this race toward an ever-receding finish line. I am not here to think, to challenge, to question. I am here to memorize.
After school, I do not go home. I go to a hagwon, the private academy my parents pay a small fortune for so that I might survive this ruthless system. The hagwon is not a place of learning; it is a factory, an assembly line where students are broken down and rebuilt into high-scoring machines. The walls are lined with motivational posters that do not motivate, only reinforce the reality that we are all replaceable. The instructors teach in rapid-fire, expecting us to absorb entire chapters in a single sitting. Some students nod off in their seats, their heads jerking forward before snapping back up, terrified of missing even a second of instruction. Others clutch energy drinks, their hands shaking from exhaustion and caffeine.
By the time I return home, it is nearly midnight. My mother greets me with a tired smile, a plate of reheated rice and kimchi waiting on the table. She asks if I studied hard. I tell her I did. She nods, satisfied. My father reminds me that my cousin got into Seoul National University. He does not say it outright, but the implication is clear: I must do the same.
I collapse into bed, but my mind refuses to shut down. There is a test tomorrow. There is always a test tomorrow. I stare at the ceiling and wonder when this will end, if this will end. My dreams are filled with scantron sheets, with the sound of pencils scratching in a silent room, with the relentless ticking of the clock as I race to finish before time runs out.
My parents tell me that success comes from suffering. They remind me of our history, of how Korea clawed its way out of the ashes of war through discipline, through relentless ambition. They say education is the only way forward. They are not wrong. But at what cost?
I have friends who do not make it. Friends who crumble under the pressure, who stare at their CSAT scores and see only failure, who decide that life outside this suffocating system is not worth living. I have known teachers who endure endless harassment from parents, who are expected to deliver perfect results, who are bullied into submission by the very people they serve. I have seen students reduced to shadows of themselves, their lives consumed by numbers on a page.
Burnout is not an exception; it is an expectation. The exhaustion is constant, a dull ache that never goes away. There are no weekends, no summer vacations, no time to simply exist. Even on Sundays, my schedule is filled with extra classes, mock exams, and self-study sessions at the library. Any moment not spent studying feels like a betrayal, a step closer to failure.
There is no escape. Even if I make it—if I earn the perfect score, gain entry into one of the SKY universities, secure a prestigious job—I know the cycle will continue. The same pressure, the same ruthless competition, only in another form.
What frightens me most is that I do not know what I would be without this system. What would I do with a life unmeasured by exams and rankings? I have no answer.
The tragedy is not just that the South Korean education system is toxic. The tragedy is that we have come to accept this toxicity as normal. We are not students. We are survivors, clawing our way through a system that has mistaken suffering for success. And I do not know if we will ever be free.