While living in Korea as a native speaker of English or even as a Korean who speaks passable English, it's almost impossible for one to not hear the words 'private lessons' being uttered sometime during your sojourn. In fact, unless you live a sheltered life, you'll be hard-pressed to avoid being asked if you can teach English to someone or someone's kids, or have another English teacher talk to you about taking on their 'privates' after their contract is up and they fly back home.
Private lessons (aka privates. In Korean '과외' or 'kwawoe'. Pronounced 'kwah-way'.) are essentially where a teacher is tutoring another student(s) outside of the classroom, such as in the student's home or coffee shop, etc...Often, some hagwons will employ the services of teachers to work part-time and under-the-table. Financially, they can be rewarding to a foreign teacher to supplement his/her contractual income, but they are illegal for those who do not have an F-2, F-4 or F-5 visa, and being caught can result in significant fines and deportation. You can, however, teach at another school if you have the proper permission from your employer and has filed the requisite paperwork with immigration.
This is a significant departure from many other countries in which people teach English, as countries such as Japan only consider private lessons from a tax-based perspective (ie, as undeclared income), whereas in Korea private lessons are frowned upon in terms of violating one's visa, and at times from the point of view of bringing an unfair advantage to those who can afford to pay for extra schooling for their children on the side.
Privates are technically illegal for Koreans as well, without a proper licence, but this is rarely enforced much in the same manner that jaywalking, opening small shops on street corners and other laws are rarely given importance.
Advertisement for private lessons (과외) by a Korean teacher. This teacher is advertising with the characters 서울대학교 in large font, showing that he or she goes to
Seoul National University.
Warning:One word of caution that fails to get mentioned by advice-givers in the ESL industry, is regarding your personal safety when dealing with new adult students. Although most people seem to think that they are 'good judges of character' and have good instincts to keep themselves out of trouble, this english teacher in Japan was murdered after visiting the home of a new adult student. Although its an extreme case, it should serve as an example of how easily things could go wrong in a situation that would normally seem to have the best of intentions. Always try to keep your lessons in a public or semi-public setting.
[edit] History
Private tutoring is commonplace all throughout Korea and subjects range from math, English, Chinese, science, to even musical instruments like cello and piano. Many Korean college students opt to tutor their way through school as a part-time means of income and usually do 'home schooling' where they come to the student's home to study. Most Korean homes have a study room set aside for their kids and/or the kid's room has dual use as a study room and bedroom.
However, since the 1970s, the Korean government has been waging a war against private education, in effort to maintain a traditionally public form of governance. Prior to Korea's economic boom, the income levels of most Koreans were on an even playing field, which made things a good fit for government-run education. Public schools always tried to rigidly maintain a sense of education equality, regardless of the income of the child's parents. However, when the economy started to run away, so did these educational ideals. As early as the 1970s, when much of Korea was still quite poor, rich children who wore expensive clothing to school were often scolded by their teachers, as it disrupted the idealistic social balance. School teachers would even go so far as to check the rice in the lunchboxes that students would bring from home, to see if the rich children would be bringing expensive rice versus the poorer students who had to bring in low quality rice. Despite the efforts, the new found wealth of Koreans and their desire to get ahead and provide a better future for their children, surpassed the efforts of the government to maintain a more publicly-centric education system. As a result, an influx of 'kwawoe' such as hagwons and gongbubangs, started occuring in the mid-70s, along with private tutors.
In 1980, one of Korea's most strict leaders of the past quarter century, Chun Do Hwan took power and immediately enacted policy that banned all forms of kwawoe. Chun's conservative agenda was to return to the old format of equalization of education opportunities between the rich and the poor. Despite the explosive growth of the private education industry since then, that particular policy was still technically in place until 2000.
It wasn't until 1989 that the government began to recognize that things aren't going exactly as they had hoped, so they relented to public appeal to allow college students to be able to teach privates.
And even though many hagwons had been in existence for 10 or even 15 years before then, it wasn't until 1991, that the government began permitting middle and high school students to attend hagwons. Which subsequently ushered in a new era and rapid increase of private education and tutoring in Korea. By 1996, Korean parents were spending $25 billion/year on private education--50 percent more than the government's education budget. A Korean family today typically spends 15 to 30 percent of its budget on private education.
This influx of private education during the early-mid 1990s brought in native English teachers and in 1996, the government cracked down on the illegals and deported many of them.
Although the immigration policies have relaxed to allow more foreigners to come teach in Korea, the government's disdain for the private education system can still be seen in that they still do not legalize private tutoring for foreigners, much in the same way that Japan and other countries have done. Because of the increasing 'braindrain' (Korean families sending their kids abroad to study.), the government clings to the public education system and worries that the legalization of private tutoring could trigger Korean families to pull kids out of the public education system altogether.
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