Comments by "" (@MarvinPowell1) on "South Korea is a Cyberpunk Dystopia" video.

I live in South Korea, in one of the cities Samsung "owns," Dongtan, and work in an after-school academy/hagwon. The "kids want to work at Samsung" line is complete BS, though. Most of my students want to be a doctor, lawyer, or "YouTuber," like any other kids. The joy and life doesn't start to fade out of children until around high school. That's when adult life really hits them. There's also two mega corporations you missed; Naver and Kakao; the Korean version of Google and Twitter. So the video is not inaccurate, but a bit hyperbolic and exaggerated. Most Koreans are not as miserable as the video implies; they just work harder than most Westerners (and only a little more than productive Americans as 5:36 shows.)
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@Simoxs7 The one thing that was left out is that required school (public school) is only about 4-5 hours a day. The rest are optional academies; things like English academy, piano academy, math academy, Tai Kwon Do classes, etc. Mandatory education is actually less than the West. It's just that the overwhelming majority of Korean students, like 80-90%, choose to do these after-school academies, each being about two hours a day. So kids will go to public school, then music academy, then English academy, then maybe one more in the day or go home. Typical school day for kids will be from 8am to 6pm, or 8am to 8pm, doing optional academies in the afternoon or evening. I'm an English teacher here in Dongtan, Gyeonggi, and have been here for four years.
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@hedgehoginasunhat Interesting. Did you work for Chungdahm (CDI) or POLY? I did three years at JLS, one of the more "fun" English academies, and I'm still here, but at a newer academy that's not corporate.
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