This book enables Western scholars and educators to recognize the roles and contributions of shadow education/hakwon education in an international context. The book allows readers to redefine the traditional and limited understanding of the background success behind Korean schooling and to expand their perspectives on Korean hakwon education, as well as shadow education in other nations with educational power, such as Japan, China, Singapore, and Taiwan. Kim exhorts readers and researchers to examine shadow education as an emerging research inquiry in the context of postcolonial and worldwide curriculum studies.

This book theorizes shadow education as a new component of curriculum, expanding the concept of curriculum to include this type of learning. Curriculum scholars and theorists have largely disregarded shadow education as a valid topic of scholarly attention despite its massive growth worldwide. But shadow education has become a global phenomenon with ever-increasing numbers of student participants; it complements school-based curricula, in many cases going beyond. Thus, Jung and Kim argue that shadow education requires rigorous analysis by curriculum studies scholars. This volume analyzes the state and importance of shadow education in countries around the world: its representative forms and industries (private tutoring institutes, home-visit private tutoring, Internet-based private tutoring, subscribed learning programs, after-school programs), its characteristic forms in terms of curriculum, and its roles in student learning. It also explores various features of shadow education based on an eight-year ethnographic study in South Korea.

This book enables Western scholars and educators to recognize the roles and contributions of shadow education/hakwon education in an international context. The book allows readers to redefine the traditional and limited understanding of the background success behind Korean schooling and to expand their perspectives on Korean hakwon education, as well as shadow education in other nations with educational power, such as Japan, China, Singapore, and Taiwan. Kim exhorts readers and researchers to examine shadow education as an emerging research inquiry in the context of postcolonial and worldwide curriculum studies.

In all parts of Asia, households devote considerable expenditures to private supplementary tutoring. This tutoring may contribute to students' achievement, but it also maintains and exacerbates social inequalities, diverts resources from other uses, and can contribute to inefficiencies in education systems. Such tutoring is widely called shadow education, because it mimics school systems. As the curriculum in the school system changes, so does the shadow. This study documents the scale and nature of shadow education in different parts of the region. Shadow education has been a major phenomenon in East Asia and it has far-reaching economic and social implications.

This volume tackles perceived myths surrounding the academic excellence of East Asian students, and moves beyond Western understanding to offer in-depth analysis of the crucial role that shadow education plays in students’ academic success. Featuring a broad range of contributions from countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, and Singapore, chapters draw on rich qualitative research to place in the foreground the lived experiences of students, teachers, and parents in East Asian countries. In doing so, the text provides indigenous insights into the uses, values, and meanings of shadow education and highlights unknown cultural and regional aspects, as well as related phenomena including trans-boundary learning culture, nomadic learning, individualized learning, and the post-schooling era. Ultimately challenging the previously dominating Western perspective on shadow education, the volume offers innovative theorization to highlight shadow education as a phenomenon which cannot be overlooked in broader discussion of East Asian educational performance, systems, and policy. Offering pioneering insights into the growing phenomenon of shadow education, this text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, curriculum studies, and East Asian educational practices and policy. Those interested in the sociology of education and educational policy will also benefit from this book.

In the half century after 1945, South Korea went from an impoverished, largely rural nation ruled by a succession of authoritarian regimes to a prosperous, democratic industrial society. No less impressive was the country's transformation from a nation where a majority of the population had no formal education to one with some of the world's highest rates of literacy, high school graduates, and university students. Drawing on their premodern and colonial heritages as well as American education concepts, South Koreans have been largely successful in creating a schooling system that is comprehensive, uniform in standard, and universal. The key to understanding this educational transformation is South Korean society's striking, nearly universal preoccupation with schooling-what Korean's themselves call their "education fever." This volume explains how Koreans' concern for achieving as much formal education as possible appeared immediately before 1945 and quickly embraced every sector of society. Through interviews with teachers, officials, parents, and students and an examination of a wide range of written materials in both Korean and English, Michael Seth explores the reasons for this social demand for education and how it has shaped nearly every aspect of South Korean society. He also looks at the many problems of the Korean educational system: the focus on entrance examinations, which has tended to reduce education to test preparation; the overheated competition to enter prestige schools; the enormous financial burden placed on families for costly private tutoring; the inflexibility created by an emphasis on uniformity of standards; and the misuse of education by successive governments for political purposes.

This volume tackles perceived myths surrounding the academic excellence of East Asian students, and moves beyond Western understanding to offer in-depth analysis of the crucial role that shadow education plays in students’ academic success. Featuring a broad range of contributions from countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, and Singapore, chapters draw on rich qualitative research to place in the foreground the lived experiences of students, teachers, and parents in East Asian countries. In doing so, the text provides indigenous insights into the uses, values, and meanings of shadow education and highlights unknown cultural and regional aspects, as well as related phenomena including trans-boundary learning culture, nomadic learning, individualized learning, and the post-schooling era. Ultimately challenging the previously dominating Western perspective on shadow education, the volume offers innovative theorization to highlight shadow education as a phenomenon which cannot be overlooked in broader discussion of East Asian educational performance, systems, and policy. Offering pioneering insights into the growing phenomenon of shadow education, this text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, curriculum studies, and East Asian educational practices and policy. Those interested in the sociology of education and educational policy will also benefit from this book.