Korean Educational Development Institute(KEDI)

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ⓒKorean Educational Development Institute (KEDI)

Abstract

Korea values education. Among OECD countries, it has the highest participation rate in upper secondary education and among the highest in tertiary education and it commits the highest percentage of GDP to expenditure on education. Its 15-year-olds are the best in the world in mathematics and problem solving and close to the best in science and reading literacy. Korea''s results are also equitable in the sense that overall differences in social background are not strongly related to differences in educational archievement, though there are not marked differences among schools in the social background of students enrolled. In archiving these results, however, young Koreans spend a great deal of their lives on school work, in and out of school. A key issue is whether Korean young people could spend more time in other childhood activities while maintaining their high-quality outcomes, as their counterparts in some other countries do.