From Hagwon to AI: How Korea Is Teaching the Next Generation
There is something rather Korean about the idea of putting artificial intelligence into the classroom. Korea has a remarkable ability to embrace new technology, scale it quickly and turn it into something that is expected to work not just for a few enthusiastic early adopters, but for society as a whole. After broadband, smartphones, online banking, food-delivery apps and an endless succession of technological innovations, education is now becoming another arena in which Korea is asking the question: How can we use technology to do this better?
Having spent years working and living in Korea, I have learned that the answer is rarely simply about the technology itself. The interesting part is what happens when technology meets Korean culture, expectations and institutions. In education, that means putting AI into a system already characterised by high academic expectations, fierce competition and an extraordinary willingness among parents and students to invest time and money in getting ahead.
Korea's AI classroom
South Korea made a particularly ambitious attempt to introduce AI-powered digital textbooks into its schools. The Ministry of Education announced that 76 AI digital textbooks had been approved for use from 2025, initially covering mathematics, English and information technology for selected grades: elementary grades 3 and 4, middle-school grade 1 and high-school grade 1. The stated objective was to move towards more personalised education, with digital material adapting to individual students' learning needs and pace.[1]
The concept sounds almost tailor-made for Korea. A traditional textbook gives essentially the same material to every student, whether the child has understood the previous chapter completely or is still wondering what happened somewhere around page 37. An AI-supported system can, in principle, identify where a student is struggling, provide additional exercises and give teachers more information about individual learning progress.
The Korean Ministry of Education presented the technology as a way of supporting teachers rather than replacing them. The idea was that AI could take over some of the repetitive or diagnostic aspects of learning while teachers concentrated more on participation, discussion, collaboration and other forms of learning that require human interaction. In theory, this sounds less like a robot teacher and more like giving every teacher an exceptionally fast assistant who never needs a coffee break.
There was, however, an important twist in the Korean story. The original plan was subsequently scaled back. In 2025, after concerns about infrastructure, teacher preparation and the evidence for educational benefits, the Korean government reclassified AI digital textbooks from official textbooks to optional educational materials. This means that AI textbooks are no longer compulsory in the way the original policy envisioned, and schools must still use conventional textbooks to fulfil curriculum requirements.[2]
That change is worth emphasising because it tells us something more interesting than the original announcement did. Korea may be technologically enthusiastic, but it is not blindly committed to putting AI everywhere simply because it exists. The country's experience is becoming a useful real-world experiment in the difference between being able to deploy technology and knowing whether deploying it actually improves education.
From 빨리빨리 to "let's see if it works"
One of the expressions foreigners quickly learn in Korea is bballi bballi—"quickly, quickly". It captures something of the country's extraordinary post-war transformation. Korea has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to move from catching up to becoming a global leader in a remarkably short period of time.
AI education initially seemed destined to follow the same pattern. Announce a national strategy, develop the technology, train the teachers, connect the schools and get moving. That is a very Korean approach to a very twenty-first-century problem.
But education is not a semiconductor factory. You cannot simply increase the processing power and expect the output to improve proportionally. Children are considerably less predictable than microchips, and teachers have the inconvenient habit of wanting to know whether a new system actually helps the students sitting in front of them and how it changes their approach to work.
The Korean experience therefore illustrates a useful lesson for the rest of the world. AI in education is not simply an infrastructure project. It is a cultural and pedagogical transformation, and those things tend to move at a rather different speed from a software update.
AI is not the same as teaching AI
There is another distinction that is easy to miss. When we talk about "AI in schools", we can mean two completely different things.
The first is using AI to teach. An AI-powered platform might personalise mathematics exercises, provide language practice, identify learning gaps or help a teacher prepare material. The second is teaching students about AI: what algorithms are, how machine learning works, what AI can and cannot do, how to evaluate an AI-generated answer and what ethical questions arise when machines make decisions.
The second category may ultimately prove just as important as the first. UNESCO's AI Competency Framework for Students, published in 2024 and updated in 2026, proposes 12 competencies across four areas: a human-centred mindset, ethics of AI, AI techniques and applications, and AI system design. The framework also distinguishes between progressing from understanding AI to applying it and ultimately creating with it.[3]
That is quite a different vision from simply giving every student an AI-enabled tablet. A child who knows how to ask ChatGPT to write an essay has learned how to operate a tool. A child who knows that the answer may be wrong, understands why it might be wrong, can verify the information and can decide when not to use AI has learned something considerably more valuable.
Korea's education culture makes the question especially interesting
This matters particularly in Korea because education has never been treated as just another public service. Academic achievement has traditionally carried enormous weight, and the country's hagwon system is perhaps the most visible expression of this phenomenon. After the regular school day ends, many students continue studying at private academies, sometimes late into the evening, while parents invest heavily in additional education.
AI therefore enters an environment that is already highly optimised around learning and performance. If technology can identify a student's weaknesses and provide targeted practice, there is an obvious attraction. The danger, however, is that AI could simply become another layer in an already intense system—another tool for studying more efficiently rather than an opportunity to rethink what students should actually be learning.
This is where the Korean experiment becomes particularly fascinating. If AI makes it easier to memorise information, generate essays and solve standard problems, the value of memorisation and standardised answers may decline. The skills that become more important are precisely those that are harder to automate: asking good questions, judging whether an answer makes sense, collaborating with other people and understanding context.
Anyone who has worked in a Korean corporation will recognise the importance of that last word. Context matters enormously in Korean professional life. Knowing the answer is one thing; understanding why the question was asked, who is asking it and how the answer affects the wider group can be something else entirely.
AI is remarkably good at the first part. Humans are still rather important for the second.
How Korea compares with the rest of the world
Korea is not conducting this experiment in isolation. Governments around the world are trying to work out how schools should respond to AI, although they are approaching the problem from different directions.
In the United States, for example, the approach is considerably more decentralised. The U.S. Department of Education issued guidance in 2025 supporting the responsible use of AI in areas such as adaptive instructional materials, AI-enhanced tutoring and college and career guidance. The guidance also emphasised privacy, teacher and parent involvement, and the principle that AI should support rather than replace educators.[4]
By August 2026, the U.S. Department of Education was putting even greater emphasis on evidence and local decision-making. Its latest guidance encouraged states and local communities to determine how technology should be used, while asking schools to consider practical questions such as what educational problem a technology solves, how long it should be used and what evidence demonstrates that it improves student learning.[5]
The contrast with Korea is therefore less about whether the two countries believe in AI. Both clearly see potential in it. The difference is partly institutional: Korea has traditionally been more comfortable with national educational initiatives, while the American system leaves considerably more decision-making to states, districts and individual schools.
Europe has taken another route, placing particularly strong emphasis on AI literacy, ethics, transparency and regulation. The European Commission's AI literacy provisions under the AI Act entered into application in February 2025, and by 2026 the Commission was working with member states on implementation and practical guidance. The broader European approach also includes support for AI literacy in primary and secondary education.[6]
In other words, if Korea's instinct has sometimes been to ask, "How can we deploy this?", Europe's instinct is more likely to include the additional question, "Under what rules should we deploy this, and what safeguards are necessary?" Neither question is sufficient on its own. Education systems need both technological ambition and the ability to recognise when technology creates more problems than it solves.
The global picture is still surprisingly immature
Despite all the excitement surrounding AI, formal AI education for children remains relatively new. UNESCO's global mapping of government-endorsed K–12 AI curricula found that only 11 countries had developed and endorsed dedicated AI curricula, with another four developing them at the time of the study. The report also identified teacher training as a crucial factor and noted the importance of project-based learning and an approach that does not tie AI education too closely to particular commercial products.[7]
That is a useful reality check. We sometimes talk about AI as though schools have already entered a new technological era and are simply deciding which version of it they prefer. In reality, much of the world is still working out what "AI education" actually means.
Should a ten-year-old learn how a neural network works? Should a twelve-year-old be taught how to spot AI-generated misinformation? Should teenagers be allowed to use generative AI when writing essays? Should an AI tutor be permitted to analyse detailed information about a child's performance? And who gets to decide?
There are no universally accepted answers yet.
The teacher may become more important, not less
There is a strange irony here. The arrival of AI in education is sometimes presented as a threat to teachers, but the more thoughtful approaches increasingly point in the opposite direction.
An AI system can identify patterns in data much faster than a teacher can. It can generate exercises, provide instant feedback and adapt material to different levels. What it cannot easily do is understand the subtle social and emotional dynamics of a classroom, recognise that a normally enthusiastic child is unusually quiet today or decide when a student needs encouragement rather than another worksheet.
The more AI handles routine information processing, the more valuable those human capabilities may become. The future classroom may therefore involve more technology but also require better teachers—people who know how to use AI without becoming dependent on it.
That is probably the most important distinction between AI replacing education and AI changing education.
The Korean paradox
And this brings us to what I find most intriguing about Korea's experiment. The country has built a world-class education system around effort, discipline and academic achievement, yet AI challenges precisely the assumptions behind some of those traditions.
For generations, students have been rewarded for knowing things. Now they have access to machines that know—or appear to know—almost everything. Students have been rewarded for producing correct answers independently. Now they can ask a machine to produce an answer before they have finished reading the question.
The obvious response would be to ban the machine.
The more difficult response is to change the question.
Instead of asking a student to write an essay that an AI can produce in seconds, perhaps the teacher asks the student to critique an AI-generated essay. Instead of asking for a list of historical facts, perhaps the student has to determine which of ten AI-generated statements are wrong. Instead of testing whether a student can produce an answer, perhaps the test asks whether the student can explain why that answer should be trusted.
That is a much more demanding form of education.
It also happens to be an education that prepares people for the workplace they are likely to enter.
From the classroom to the Korean corporation
When I look at AI through the lens of my own experience in Korea, I am reminded of something that took me considerably longer to understand than it should have. Korean corporate culture is often described from the outside in terms of hierarchy, titles and rules, but the reality is more nuanced. Much of the time, success depends on understanding relationships, context, expectations and the unwritten rules surrounding the official ones.
AI will be extraordinarily useful in the Korean workplace. It can translate, analyse data, draft reports, summarise meetings and automate countless routine tasks. But it will not eliminate the need to understand who should be consulted before a decision is made, how an idea should be presented to a senior colleague or why the technically perfect solution may not be the culturally appropriate one.
In that sense, the lesson for Korean schools is not fundamentally different from the lesson I encountered in Korean corporate life. Technology can help you navigate the system, but it does not remove the need to understand the people within it.
Perhaps Korea's biggest lesson is not about AI
Korea's journey with AI in education is therefore more interesting than the simple story of a technologically advanced country putting artificial intelligence into schools. The country moved aggressively towards AI-powered textbooks, discovered that implementation was more complicated than expected, and subsequently shifted towards a more cautious and optional model.
That is not necessarily a story of success or failure. It is a story of experimentation—and perhaps that is exactly what education systems around the world need right now.
Korea has provided an unusually visible laboratory because its education system is technologically sophisticated, highly competitive and capable of implementing policy at national scale. The United States is experimenting within a more decentralised structure, while Europe is putting considerable emphasis on literacy, ethics and regulation. UNESCO, meanwhile, is trying to establish a common language for what children should actually know about AI.
The global question is ultimately not whether children should use artificial intelligence. They already do, whether schools like it or not. The more important question is whether schools can teach them to use it intelligently.
That means knowing when to ask AI for help, when to challenge its answer and when to switch it off.
It means understanding that an impressive-looking answer is not necessarily a correct one. And perhaps most importantly, it means making sure that children do not become better at using machines while becoming worse at thinking for themselves.
A very Korean ending
There is something fitting about Korea being at the centre of this discussion. The country that transformed itself from a war-ravaged economy into a global technology powerhouse has once again found itself at the leading edge of a technological transition. But its experience with AI textbooks also demonstrates that even Korea's famous bballi bballi approach has its limits.
Sometimes the sensible Korean response to a new technology is not "quickly, quickly".
Sometimes it is: "Let's try it, see what happens, and adjust".
That may turn out to be the most useful lesson of all.
AI will change the classroom. It will change the workplace. It will almost certainly change Korea. But if the technology is used wisely, the objective should not be to produce children who are better at talking to machines.
It should be to produce adults who are better at thinking, questioning, creating and working with other people—with machines as tools rather than substitutes for human judgement.
And that is a lesson that travels rather well beyond Seoul.
About Seoul Searching
For readers interested in the cultural background behind some of the observations in this article, my book, Seoul Searching: An Expat's Tale of Thriving in Korean Corporations and Culture, combines personal experiences of living and working in Korea with observations about Korean culture, corporate life and the sometimes entertaining misunderstandings that occur when Western assumptions meet Korean reality.
Sources/footnotes
Picture generated by ChatGPT.
[1] https://english.moe.go.kr/boardCnts/viewRenewal.do?boardID=265&boardSeq=102075&lev=0&m=0201&opType=N&page=1&s=english&searchType=null&statusYN=W&utm_source=chatgpt.com
[2] OECDpublishing: OECD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PAPERS December 2025, No. 52
[3] https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ai-competency-framework-students?hub=195885&utm_source=chatgpt.com
[4] https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-issues-guidance-artificial-intelligence-use-schools-proposes-additional-supplemental-priority?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-text-block&utm_source=chatgpt.com
[5] https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-releases-guidance-responsible-use-of-education-technology-classroom?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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