*This article contains spoilers for the Netflix series <True Education>

The Netflix series <True Education>, based on a webtoon of the same name, resembles the schools that appear within it. It is a mess to the point that you do not know where to begin fixing it. Starting from a source material riddled with support for corporal punishment, youth-hatred, misogyny, and hostility toward so-called juvenile offenders was not reassuring, but given the controversies around casting and production, I thought they would at least try to overcome the original’s problems. I even held out a bit of hope after hearing that director Hong Jong-chan, who also directed Netflix’s <Juvenile Justice> that approached juvenile crime in Korea with some seriousness, sympathized with the controversy and aimed to adapt the work with as restrained a perspective as possible. Yet the filmed <True Education> chooses to package its worldview hostile to the vulnerable as something sacred rather than reflectively examining it.

In episode 2, Choi Kang-seok (Lee Sung-min), the Minister of Education who created the Teacher Protection Bureau that can take any measure including corporal punishment, answers a reporter asking about violations of student rights, “Did you say human rights? (omitted) How can normal classes proceed when teacher authority has collapsed? Of course, students who can rely on cram schools or private tutoring will manage without school classes, but some students have nothing but school classes to depend on. (omitted) The Teacher Protection Bureau will use corporal punishmentno, even the grandfather of corporal punishmentto protect students’ right to learn.”

Backed by a weighty performance, this sounds responsible, but it is in fact a circular argument. It claims that worrying about student rights has caused teacher authority and the right to learn to collapse, and the reason is that only corporal punishment can protect teacher authority and learning rights. In some ways, the entire episode is this very circularity. It depicts the violation of learning rights suffered by kind, weak Kim Hyeong-ju (Jeon Bong-seok) at Guun High-Tech High School, which resembles a gang den, yet after presenting a jungle that can only be subdued when someone with absolute force like the protagonist Na Hwa-jin (Kim Mu-yeol) intervenes, it declares that force and corporal punishment are the solution for learning rights. That is merely tautology.

If anything, episode 2 is an action romp whose exaggerated tone makes it easier to enjoy apart from real-world context. But the more it keeps tossing out messages about real education and striking a pious pose, the more its world becomes systematically distorted.

Episode 3, likely the worst of the series, is astonishing in several ways: it renders the perpetrator student Han Ye-ri (Park Seo-yoon) as a demonic figure in a way even more sensational than the already controversial original. In the webtoon, Han Ye-ri manipulates a friend to frame teacher Go Young-su (Kwon Hyuk) for sexual harassment; after he is dismissed and dies by suicide, she shrugs it off as mere misunderstanding. In <True Education>, she goes further, disheveling her clothes and publicly claiming on Instagram that she was sexually harassed.

If the original at least nominally touched on procedural issues regarding Go Young-su’s disciplinary action, the Netflix version depicts Han Ye-ri as the very embodiment of men’s fantasy of a false #MeToo. It is a story full of harm that insults the achievements of the movement over the past decade, and the more it is cited as if delivering hard truths to actual classrooms, the deeper the distortion grows.

What the original, this screen adaptation, and many consumers of both brandish like a treasured sword is the claim that almost everything is based on real incidents. Episode 3 also references the case of a male teacher who died by suicide at a middle school in 2017. Yet the context that in the real case students recanted false statements and apologized, that the education office nevertheless pushed ahead with excessive audits and discipline, and that the bereaved family focused on this point, disappears entirely. All that remains is the image of a cunning young girl who, through a false sex-crime accusation, drives a good man to ruina figure easy to curse, easy to beat down, and convenient for justifying men’s resentment.

Because a single villain wields near-omnipotent power as the sole source of all evil, the Teacher Protection Bureau can only prevail by exercising even greater power. Han Ye-ri plummets when Bong Geun-dae (Pyo Ji-hoon), a computer whiz, hacks and exposes on social media the original, staged footage that fueled the harassment furor. Stripped of the episode’s inherent harm, this might feel cathartic, but within a structure where only transcendent force, power, and skill can resolve matters, <True Education> offers no outlook for real education.

Episode 5, which in many ways recalls the Seo 2 Elementary School incident, is all the more deceitful for the solemn performance and direction that accompany Choi Kang-seok’s nationwide apology to teachers who ended their lives or now suffer due to encroachments on teacher authority: “I am sorry that, due to the absence of an educational system, you were left unprotected and forced to endure alone.” No one calls “a system” the act of crushing one villain to solve a problem. <True Education> shows ideal teachers like Jung Sun-young (Lee Sang-hee) in episode 3 and Choi Ji-seon (Song Si-an) in episode 5 being tormented by unfair slander, while an odious teacher like Cheon Sang-yeol (Choi Deok-mun) in episode 4 prospersthen saves the righteous and punishes the vicious.

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Of course that heightens catharsis, but what an educational system must protect is the majority of teachers who are generally decent yet not infallible. What matters is the belief that teachers can be wrong, yet can discuss, adjust, and find better paths without mutual distrust with students and parents. Without a belief and safety net that everyone can err and be corrected together, teachers become service providers, students become consumers, and parents become petitionerseach fragmented into separate roles.

Despite all its talk of systems and protection, <True Education> shuns the gray zones where trust and coordination are needed. Instead, within a binary of one kind student whose learning rights are violated versus the rest who are thugs; angelic teachers versus demonic students; teachers who love children versus parents who are malicious complainants; diligent, justice-minded students versus corrupt teachers; forbearing adults versus irredeemable juvenile offenders, it emphasizes only the thrill of retribution.

At least in episodes 9 and 10the highlight of this work and an original arc absent from the webtoonwhen upright teachers including Sun-young join forces to thwart Jo Gyu-cheol’s (Lee Bong-jun) drug operation by gathering narcotics hidden throughout the school, it seems to aim at overcoming this action-first, “cider” storytelling and realizing literal “true education.” There is clear narrative ambition to distinguish itself from the original, and it is even fairly moving.

But even this heroic moment plays out as a covert mission in which teachers secretly collect contraband that is an unequivocal crimedrug purchasesrather than imagining ways to assume risks and conflicts on the ground as educators and to discipline or reform. It cannot do otherwise. The conflicts <True Education> depicts at school are situations that only deployment of the Teacher Protection Bureau can resolve, whereas the multilayered walls that cause real teachers to feel powerless are ones that even the Bureau, with all the corporal punishment in the world, cannot smash through.

For example, while Choi Kang-seok and Na Hwa-jin have no hesitation about taking down the so-called social elitesRyu Gwang-pil (Song Young-gyu), a leading presidential contender and father of a school violence perpetrator; politicians and businesspeople linked to their children’s academic fraudepisode 8, which takes on the special pre-med tracks in Daechi-dong where class inheritance through education and real inequality unfold, narrows the issue to illegal misuse of ADHD medication. The villain is even cast as the mother of Hyun-min (Seo Young-hee), not a Daechi-dong native, who whips her son toward medical school out of class-climbing vanity.

It may be satisfying to scold students who act out under the cover of parental power and their parents as well, but the essence of this vaunted “true education” is to stay silent or look the other way at the unequal social structure that enables the inheritance of power through an education system. If this story still feels cathartic, perhaps what our society truly desires is not the normalization of education, but the thrill of corporal punishmentpretending otherwise, pretending to be righteous.

▼ Columnist Wi Geun-woo