Teachers across South Korea are increasingly expressing regret over their choice of profession and pressing the government for stronger protections, as complaints over harassment from parents and students, coupled with heavy administrative burdens, continue to erode morale in the country’s classrooms. 

The frustration was on full display as large numbers of teachers, dressed in black, gathered outside the National Assembly in Seoul for a sit-in demonstration demanding concrete action from lawmakers and the Education Ministry.

The discontent is not new, but it has deepened in recent years. Surveys conducted through the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey have repeatedly placed South Korea among the countries with the highest share of teachers who say they would choose a different career if given the chance, despite Korean teachers earning salaries well above the OECD average.

Educators point to a familiar set of grievances: verbal abuse and threats from students, aggressive complaints from parents, and a legal environment where a single child-abuse allegation, however unfounded, can see a teacher suspended from the classroom pending investigation.

The issue has taken on fresh urgency this year after the Education Ministry initially resisted calls to create a dedicated bureau for protecting teachers’ rights, only to reverse course under pressure from teachers’ unions and education officials in several provinces. The debate has been amplified by the runaway popularity of the Netflix series “Teach You a Lesson,” which centres on a fictional Teachers’ Rights Protection Bureau empowered to intervene forcefully on educators’ behalf. While the ministry has since proposed a smaller division-level unit to centralise responses to complaints against teachers, the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations has dismissed the plan as “window dressing,” insisting that only a full bureau-level body with legal authority can address what it describes as the collapse of public education’s support systems for teachers.

For many educators, the demands go beyond bureaucratic restructuring. Teachers’ groups have long pushed for amendments to the Child Abuse Crimes Act, arguing that its current form leaves them exposed to complaints that can derail careers even when discipline was carried out reasonably.

The Education Ministry has responded with incremental measures, including rules allowing teachers to remove disruptive students from class and confiscate phones, but unions maintain these steps fall short of the systemic protection teachers say they need to stay in the profession they once found rewarding.

Photo Credit: AP News