Rural school closures accelerate in South Korea

Max Kim reported in yesterday's Los Angeles Times under the headline, "In South Korea, a struggle to fill classroom seats."  An excerpt follows: 

In the last 10 years, the number of elementary school-age students in the county has fallen from 2,687 to 1,832. Nearly every one of the 16 elementary schools in the county has lost students over this period, some by the hundreds.

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The decline of rural schools in South Korea began with the country’s rapid industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, when farming and fishing villages saw a mass exodus of young workers to Seoul and other big cities.

The story focuses on what is happening in Cherowon County, on the border with North Korea:

Cheorwon County has one of the highest rates of population flight, as young people leave in search of jobs, better education opportunities or greater access to services such as medical care and public transportation. Officials recently classified it as an “extinction risk.”

Due to its proximity to the Korean demilitarized zone, the county is heavily fortified, and military personnel and their families make up around 60% of the population. In recent years, however, even the military has been moving out.

Since 2018, when the total population was around 47,000, the county has lost about 1,000 people a year.

At a senior center across from Dochang Elementary, a group of grandmothers whose children and grandchildren have all long since left said they worried that closing the school would drain the community of what little vitality remained.

“When else would we see children?” said Ha Su-ja, 79. “I like to listen to the sounds of them playing when the school holds sports day.”

Nationwide, the number of elementary schools in rural areas has dropped from around 5,200 in 1982 to roughly 4,000 today.

Schools, along with hospitals and other public institutions, have overwhelmingly amassed in cities, seeding the very demographic emergency the country now faces. More than half the population lives in the Seoul metropolitan area, where the high cost of living — including education — has discouraged people from having children.

As a result, South Korean women now give birth to just 0.78 children on average, far below the 2.1 needed to maintain the current population.

The story closes with this quote from Lee Eun-Sook, principal of the tiny Dochang Elementary school:  

I want the children to be proud that they are from Cheorwon, no matter how small it is. I want the fact that they graduated from Dochang to give them that one extra spoonful of confidence.

As a rural kid myself, I appreciate that sentiment.