The front gate of Seoi Elementary School in southern Seoul is filled with condolence messages and flowers on July 20, 2023, as mourners queue up to pay respects to a female teacher who died on July 18 by an apparent suicide. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Jan. 15 (Korea Bizwire) — A growing number of young teachers in South Korea are reconsidering teaching as a lifelong career, with a sharp decline in those planning to stay in the profession until retirement following the widely publicized death of an elementary school teacher in 2023, a new academic study has found.
The findings, published Wednesday in the journal of the Korean Society for The Study of Teacher Education (KSSTE), suggest that the so-called Seoicho incident—after a teacher at Seoi Elementary School in Seoul died by suicide amid alleged harassment by a parent—has had a lasting and uneven psychological impact on the teaching workforce, hitting younger educators particularly hard.
The study, authored by Shin Eun-young, an elementary school teacher, analyzed data from 1,218 participants in the Korea Educational Development Institute’s longitudinal survey of elementary school teachers from 2021 to 2023.
It found that teachers’ willingness to remain in the profession until the mandatory retirement age weakened steadily over the three-year period, with the steepest drop occurring in 2023.
Among teachers in their 20s and 30s, the share expressing an intention to stay until retirement fell sharply in 2023, the year of the Seoicho incident.
On a scale where 1 indicates a clear intention to remain in teaching until retirement and 0 indicates the opposite, the average score for younger teachers dropped to 0.45 in 2023, down from 0.57 a year earlier. The decline was twice as large as that recorded between 2021 and 2022.
Older teachers also showed signs of eroding commitment, but to a much lesser degree. For educators in their 40s and above, the retirement-intention score slipped from 0.61 in 2022 to 0.57 in 2023.
Separate survey data cited in the paper point to a similar pattern. Among early-career teachers, the proportion saying they planned to remain in teaching until retirement fell by nearly nine percentage points in 2023, compared with a roughly five-point decline among mid-career teachers.
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The results suggest that younger teachers are more vulnerable to changes in the working environment and more sensitive to high-profile incidents involving parental pressure and weak institutional protections, the author wrote.
While the Seoicho case affected teachers across age groups, its impact appears to have been felt most acutely by those at earlier stages of their careers.
The study calls for stronger legal and institutional safeguards to protect teachers from harassment, tailored emotional support programs, and continued research into the long-term effects of the Seoicho incident, warning that without such measures, South Korea may struggle to retain a new generation of educators in its classrooms.
Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
