[Teheran-ro] Children Who Have Lost the Time to Find Their Dreams

It has not been long since I started covering the Ministry of Education, yet policy announcements have come in rapid succession. Measures to support the rollout of the high school credit system, plans to adjust the difficulty framework of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), policies on private education for infants and toddlers, and intensive inspections of private academy fees have all been unveiled one after another.
It is hard to reject the intent of these policies outright. The direction is clear: to nurture children’s aptitudes, interests, and career paths while reducing reliance on private education.
The problem is that what we hear from the field sounds very different. Policymakers talk about diversity, but parents and teachers complain that children’s schedules have only become more tightly packed.
A friend of mine who has children in middle and high school put it this way: "Kids are just too busy. They have to study, they have to get good grades, and they have to take care of the subject-specific detailed performance and special remarks in the student record. They have no time to calmly think about what they really want to do or to dream about their future."
So while education policies claim to broaden the range of choices for students’ careers and college paths, reality does not seem to match that promise.
Measures introduced in the name of fostering diversity are in fact pushing children into competition at an even earlier age. They are also moving up the point at which students are forced to agonize over their future paths.
Starting with the 2028 College Entrance System, the unified College Scholastic Ability Test (unified CSAT), a five-level school grading system, and the high school credit system will all take effect at once. In this new structure, it will be difficult to get by either by focusing only on school grades or by relying solely on a strong CSAT score.
The anxiety parents feel in this system is straightforward. They worry that even if their child finds a goal later on, it may already be too late. There are students who only begin to focus on studying in their final year of high school, and others who decide on a career path belatedly, and they clearly face limits in their choice of universities. This is why parents feel compelled to start preparing earlier.
The craze for sending infants and toddlers to private English academies is not an entirely separate phenomenon.
The impatience that at least English must be raised to a certain level in advance seems to spring from the same root.
We said we would no longer rank students with a single exam, but we should ask ourselves whether that space has simply been filled with more records and even tighter monitoring.
Policy talks about diversity in career paths, but if what parents actually feel is that "in the end, only model students survive to the very end," it will be hard to stop the race to secure an earlier starting line. What children truly need may not be a life of flawless, early, and constant management, but more time and more chances to discover their dreams at their own pace, even if that means starting a little later.
spring@fnnews.com Reporter