Coming home after an absence of nearly five years, I found Seoul slightly unfamiliar, with more high-rise apartment complexes and differently colored buses. Odder still were a number of yellow vans busily navigating through apartment neighborhoods in bright daylight and even during weekends. They are the vehicles of private crammers carrying children. Private education fever seemed to have intensified during my absence.

Seeing children being ferried about in their yellow buses after school or by their mothers as if they were performers on a tight schedule made me ask what on earth it was all for?

Some Korean children who go abroad with their parents see their life turn upside down. A diplomat who brings up two middle school boys told me his elder son, who was regarded as a model student in Korea by attending crammers diligently and getting excellent school records, had serious difficulties adapting to the new life abroad. “What’s the point of being alive?” his foreign friends asked him. In contrast, the younger son, who had been a source of headaches at home, smoothly settled down, playing football, singing well, making friends easily and learning French more quickly.

Parents' perception of and attitudes to their children’s life skills must change. If you are satisfied with the short-term gain of your child winning the competition with the neighbor's, then by all means stake everything on college entrance. But in a country where changes two or three decades hence are impossible to foretell in the global era, perhaps it is better to think of making a long-term investment.

Our success formula may have been effective in achieving Korea's ascent to the level of a medium-developed country; at the threshold of becoming an advanced nation, they no longer serve us so well. Our labor productivity per hour, at US$20.4 as of 2006, is near the bottom of the OECD or 26th among the 29 countries surveyed. It accounts for only 40 percent of the $49.90 of France and the $50.40 of the U.S., but our working hours are the longest.

If we want to become an advanced country, we should either become more creative at work, producing more added value in the same number of hours, or become more productive in fewer hours. It's high time that we learned time management skill from countries that have conquered time effectively.

Instead, we drive even elementary schoolchildren to their crammers, and they go to bed at 11 or 12 p.m. Parents in France or Germany send their children go to bed at 8 or 9 p.m. After school, children there spend the afternoon playing football or tennis. On vacation, they have fun playing with their parents and study to an extent they can cope with. They know the order of priorities in life, and are aware that they should not miss their youth. Intellectual curiosity and healthy physical strength are the most important assets they nourish in childhood and youth.

It's pointless to expect children whose lives run to a tight schedule until late at night to know anything of creativity. How can we expect a happy, bright future from our younger generation before parents' gnawing insecurity and impatience is addressed? That is the first impression I had when I came home after four years and eight months.

The column was contributed by Kang Kyung-hee from the Chosun Ilbo's Business Desk.