A public debate on education grants was recently held between the Ministry of Planning and Budget and the Ministry of Education. The budget ministry argues that as the school-age population declines, the system linking grants to 20.79% of domestic taxes should be abolished. Public opinion largely supports the ministry's claim that regional education offices have surplus budgets and are engaging in populist spending.
Yet the logic presented at the debate for abolishing the linkage system was puzzling. Kim Hak-soo, a senior research fellow at the Korea Development Institute (KDI), pointed out that "the grant structure is like having one-fifth of your salary automatically transferred even after your children have graduated." This framing was designed to make those who are not direct beneficiaries feel aggrieved. But by that logic, the same would apply to health insurance, the national pension, and welfare budgets. Dividing national survival infrastructure, in which society invests collectively, along lines of direct benefit cannot be a valid framework.
The budget minister argued this was not a reduction, saying, "We will increase the total amount of grants every year." But he could not answer the Seoul education superintendent's counter-question: "Why not simply leave the linkage rate as it is?" With labor costs and prices rising every year, easing the linkage rate means a reduction in real investment capacity even if the nominal total increases. Concealing this behind the phrase "total increase" is not honest rhetoric.
The Ministry of Education, for its part, brought forward workers in higher education, lifelong education, and early childhood education to appeal for sharing the budget. This revealed an intention to remove the partitions so that budgets for kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school education could also be used in other areas of the ministry, in order to maintain the linkage rate. Even if the grant ratio is preserved, if the partitions are removed, cuts to budgets for kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school education will ultimately be unavoidable. Schools on the ground appeal for budget shortages, while outsiders see the budgets as surplus—a situation for which education offices also bear responsibility for failing to spend their finances effectively. Amid rising private education spending, dropout rates, and suicide rates, student happiness ranks lowest among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The collapse of teachers' authority and school violence are serious. There are attempts at innovation, but they are insufficient to change the overall trend.
The budget ministry's argument ultimately amounts to maintaining the status quo while redistributing the excess tax revenue generated by the semiconductor boom. Yet no one is talking about national education reform. It is self-evident that the current education system is no longer competitive in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Among the 38 OECD countries, Korea is the only nation where both the college entrance exam and school records are entirely multiple-choice, relative-evaluation systems. Budget design at the level of maintaining the status quo is a declaration to abandon education reform. A full paradigm shift across kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school education is a radical reform requiring budgets on the scale of trillions of won, and it is impossible without an opportunity such as excess tax revenue. This is not a project for the Ministry of Education alone, but a national project that will change the country's future. The debate over grants must shift its focus to whether we will merely maintain the status quo in our education, or carry out sweeping, groundbreaking reform.
Historically, the countries that seized their era were those that first confronted and responded to the great currents of change. Abandoning a golden opportunity for comprehensive education reform that will shape the coming decades is an evasion of the government's responsibility. We must not miss the "golden time for education reform."
