Week 7: SKY Castle: Korea's Education Fever
Private tutors, university admissions, and the extremes a satire has to reach to feel exaggerated
5 April 2027
SKY Castle (스카이 캐슬) is a satire of the pressure to get children into Korea’s top three universities (Seoul, Korea, and Yonsei — the “SKY” of the title), following wealthy families and the private admissions coordinators they hire. It’s exaggerated by design, but the exaggeration is a useful diagnostic: it only works as satire because the underlying pressure is real and widely recognised.
Questions#
- Why is education so socially important in Korea, beyond “parents want their children to do well”?
- What role does university entrance play in family life and family status?
- How do private academies and competition shape childhood, in the show and outside it?
- What does SKY Castle exaggerate for satire, and what does it capture accurately about the pressure underneath?
What to take from this week#
- education as a site where family status and a child’s future are both understood to be at stake
- university admissions and the weight placed on a small number of institutions
- private education / hagwon culture as an industry built around that weight
- social mobility, and education’s role as a (contested) route to it
- parental pressure as something the show amplifies rather than invents
- inequality — who can afford the private coordinators the show centres, and who can’t
Teaching team
- May Rhee — convenor