Honestly, I don't know how Chinese, South Korean, Japanese, (etc.) kids do it. They're under such immense pressure to succeed.
A colleague from South Korea explain to me that his daughter, 11yo, back in korea had school from 8:00 until 15:00, then had extra math class from 15:00 until 20:00 -every day- then spend 3 hours on homework. As a west-european, this sounds to me like child abuse, but ok.
It is.
Lack of sleep and leisure time will do more damage in the long run than the short term benefits of 16+ hours of learning a day will ever do good.
Pretend you're a Korean parent and you want your kid to succeed without overworking them. Assume you have perfect knowledge of the state of the Korean education system and are not affected by cultural biases. How would you go about raising your child?
I would do exactly what he did, move to Germany.
Not abuse them. Give them sleep and a better life.
If the goal is to raise a person who is happy and competent and confident and healthy, not overworking them with fairly inconsequential math. Anything but that.
Escape from this damned country, there's no hope here. (This came from my experience. I should've escaped but stuck here trying 2nd round of CSAT.)
Am Hong Kong uni student. I can tell you that the workload in college is significantly lower than in primary or secondary school.
In HK (and I think in China as well), all of your school life leads to 1 important exam, and this exam determines whether you get into uni or not.
For real. Asian kids don't have lives outside of school, they are like robots with one purpose in mind - to pass. High suicide rates are not coming from nowhere.