The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley

Author:Amanda Ripley [Ripley, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, General, History, Special Education, Gifted, Testing & Measurement, Educational Policy & Reform, Comparative, Juvenile Nonfiction, Reference
ISBN: 9781451654424
Google: EnU-AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1451654421
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Celebrity Teacher: Andrew Kim teaches at a Megastudy hagwon in the Daechi-dong neighborhood of Seoul.

When Andrew Kim taught English, he spoke quietly into a tiny hands-free microphone that protruded from under his right ear. He wrote on an old-fashioned chalkboard. He didn’t seem to be doing anything remarkable, but in his class, unlike so many Korean classes, the students did not sleep.

Andrew Kim earned $4 million in 2010. He was known in Korea as a rock-star teacher, a combination of words that I’d never heard before. He’d been teaching for over twenty years, all of them in Korea’s private afterschool tutoring hagwons. That meant that he was paid according to the demand for his skills, unlike most teachers worldwide. And he was in high demand.

I interviewed Kim in his office in a luxury high-rise building in Seoul in June 2011. One of his employees greeted me at the door and offered me bottled water. We gathered around a table, and Kim explained that he worked about sixty hours per week, although he only taught three in-person lectures. The Internet had turned his classes into commodities. Each lecture he did went online, where kids could purchase his teaching services at the rate of $3.50 per hour. The rest of the time, he responded to students’ online requests for help, developed lesson plans, and wrote textbooks and workbooks. He’d written about two hundred books. “The harder I work, the more I make,” he said. “I like that.”

He didn’t seem overly proud of his salary, but he didn’t seem embarrassed by it either. Most of his earnings came from the 150,000 kids who watched his lectures online each year. Kim was a brand, I came to realize, with the overhead that entailed. He employed thirty people to help him manage his teaching empire. He ran a publishing company to produce his books.

To call this tutoring was to wildly underestimate its scale and sophistication. Megastudy, the online hagwon that Kim worked for, was listed on the Korean stock exchange. Three of every four Korean kids participated in the private market. In 2011, their parents spent almost $18 billion on cram schools, which was more than the federal government spent fighting the drug war in the United States. The so-called tutoring business was so profitable that it attracted investments from places like Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, and A.I.G.

The involvement of multinational bankers in education was, generally speaking, ominous. Still, there was something thrilling about meeting Andrew Kim. For the first time, I was in the presence of a teacher who earned the kind of money professional athletes earned. Here was a teacher—a teacher—who was part of the 1 percent. Someone with his ambition and abilities might have become a banker or a lawyer in the United States, but in Korea, he’d become a teacher, and he was rich anyway.

The idea was seductive. What better way to guarantee that the best and brightest went into teaching than to make the greatest teachers millionaires? Maybe Korea offered a model for the world after all.

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