[andrewprock]

The power of education has nothing to do with the teachers. It has to do with hiring for professional employment with degree requirements (e.g. management, government, lab techs, etc). There are tons of people who can do various jobs but do not have the required (often extraneous) certification. Parents are not chasing learning, they are chasing certification. Those two things correlate, but not enough to satisfy parents.

A good example of this is journalism, which used to require little to no certification, but which today can require masters degrees for some positions.

In the end, the people that know and learn will have longer more productive careers, but there are enough sinecures in Korean (and US) society that the value of certification is overweighted.