A contestant stands on the podium, her voice quivering as she meticulously coordinates her actions to match the content. Yet behind the performance hides months of memorization of when to move her hand.
A six-year-old stands anxiously on a podium, suited up in a tailored fit. He recites a perfectly memorized monologue on the impact of global warming with immaculate intonation and polished English pronunciation. With the ring of a bell, he returns to his flawed Korean, unable to narrate in his mother tongue.
English speech contests, commonly affiliated with prestigious institutions, serve as a high-stakes showcase that prioritizes a child’s ability to mimic native-level phonetic accuracy over understanding.
Presented with an affiliation with the United Nations or top universities in the nation like the coveted SKY (acronym for Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University), parents see the way to get ahead of the competition. These affiliations often function as a mask of legitimacy, which allows hagwons to sell the superficial idea of success without actual learning.
The prospects of this shallow success imposes the use of an additional language on children who have yet to attain proficiency in their mother tongue. With such contests, parents sacrifice the growth of critical thinking in Korean for a futile attempt at verbal imitation.
Take the six-year-old as an example. His speech on global warming contains abstract, high-level concepts, drafted at a hagwon (external education institution). Behind the pages, the child fails to define the concept of the words they supposedly ‘wrote’. Real understanding, therefore, never takes root. Only a shell of understanding exists beneath the surface of their performance. “[The contests] only care about fluency, gesture, and confidence, but not the content. The kids don’t draft the content anyway. For an outside-of-school competition, even if anyone can apply, not all gain the right to actually compete,” said Yujin Lee, an English hagwon teacher. “If the draft is bad, they will not let them pass the preliminary rounds. So someone would write, paraphrase, and edit to even submit it to the preliminary round.”
To hagwons, success in prestigious competitions build a track record that justifies the hefty tuition. Counterintuitively, the desire to appease the parents diminishes the purpose of an educational institution designed to stimulate further learning. Children memorize a script and walk away with neither the language nor the knowledge benefits of the contest. “Hagwons do so simply to satisfy their parents. But for their education or future? No. But a common misconception hagwon teachers have is that they believe memorization is the correct method,” said Lee.
A trophy gleams at the top of the pyramid as children strain beneath the weight of imitating English. As the entrenched system keep parents anxious, students suffer as a result.
This result-centric culture does not confine itself to hagwons alone. Parents, shaped by the same competitive system, continue the logic. In Korea’s hypercompetitive culture, where achievements define social status, a head start in English proves more than just proficiency. It shows a family’s position within a society that equates early academic pressure with future success.
Thus, questioning the value of the contest feels indistinguishable from doubting the value of its prestige and ambition. “The Korean education system further prompts this, as people only focus on the results. No emphasis is placed on the process. There is no step-by-step learning culture,” said Lee. “It is less about learning and more about accumulation — trophies, certificates, and accolades collected as evidence of worth. At its core, it reduces a child’s intelligence to results alone. And it will not change; if anything, it deepens.”
Parents who enroll their children in speech contests do so as an alternative to falling behind. “Everyone can already see the problems that arise with these contests. They are just refusing to accept it. They just care too much about what others perceive of them. They only see the results on who did better at memorization, not on whose idea is more creative or so,” said Lee. “Even the topics and prompts are predetermined, scripted from the outset. It is a system built not on invitation, but on imposition.”
The six-year-old steps off the podium, greeted by empty applause for an empty shell on global warming. He leaves the stage with a systemized mimicry and a subject he cannot explain in either language.
The fear of failure has long plagued Korean society. Speech competitions evaluated on the clarity of reasoning rather than the accuracy of accent would mitigate the issues of the current model. The metric of a child’s language proficiency should reflect learning rather than the superficial prestige associated with such competitions.
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