'Sorry for playing': Despite world's lowest birthrate, in Korea school activities muted by residents, parents

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Park Sung-jae, an MC, has spent 24 years hosting children's events, which used to be lively days full of outdoor activities and kids joyfully expressing themselves. 

However, these days, the first thing he does at a school sports day is to have the kids say “sorry.”

“We're sorry. We'll only play for a little while today,” a group of about 100 elementary students in Daegu chanted in unison, facing the apartment blocks adjacent to their school before their sports day started. 

The video spread widely across the country — and the size of the school it captured reflects Korea's 0.8 total fertility rate, the world's lowest.  But despite the country's desperate need for more children, it is growing less tolerant of the ones it has.

Elementary students in Daegu turn toward a nearby apartment complex and chant an apology before their sports day begins in a video shared by Instagram user '@super_tiger' on May 14, 2025. "We're sorry. We'll only play for a little while today. Thank you," the students said in unison, following the MC's lead.

SCREEN CAPTURE

“The complaints are frequent at these events,” Park told the Korea JoongAng Daily on May 4. “The kids saying sorry is a genuine attempt to get the neighbors to see them as cute rather than a nuisance.” 

Before nearly every sports day, schools give Park the same instruction: Keep the volume down. 

Speakers get angled away from nearby apartment blocks, and when that isn't enough, police get called or residents walk onto school grounds mid-event to pull the plug themselves — a far cry from the days when a school sports day was considered a neighborhood celebration, drawing curious onlookers from the surrounding streets.

For many schools, the logical conclusion has been to move sports day indoors altogether, where no one outside can hear them.

According to the National Police Agency, 350 noise complaints related to school sports events were made to the emergency line in 2025, and police were dispatched to 345 of them.

What was once a place where children grew up together — through running about, competing and sharing experiences both in and out of the classroom — is increasingly becoming a stripped-down service operation, experts say, one that would rather do less than risk a complaint. 

No more first place 

According to a teacher in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi, who has taught for 27 years, individual footraces — where children used to get their hands stamped 1st, 2nd or 3rd — are gone.

“Now the point is simply that every child crosses the finish line,” said Kim, who asked to be identified only by her surname.

Awards and prizes in the classroom have been phased out too, after parents complained that losing hurt their children's confidence.

Group performances — such as traditional fan dances that classes once rehearsed for months — have also disappeared following parent complaints that the preparation cut into class time.

With teachers unwilling to absorb the risk of organizing events themselves, many schools now outsource the entire day to private event companies.

Activities outside school have fared worse. 

After a court ruled in autumn 2025 that a teacher should face criminal charges over a student's death during an off-campus activity in Gangwon, schools across the country all quietly drew the same conclusion: The safest field trip is no field trip at all. In the past, such accidents led to institutional responses, financial compensation or civil litigation at most.

A parent of two children in Seocho District, southern Seoul, surnamed Cho, said her son's elementary school no longer runs any off-campus trips at all. 

Cho's son started elementary school just as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and by the time restrictions lifted, the climate around teacher liability had already changed. Consequently, he has never been on a school field trip in his entire six years of elementary school. 

"He saw his older sister — four years ahead of him — pack lunchboxes for day trips, go on overnight excursions and do father-and-child camping through school, so he had high hopes," Cho said. "But he is quite disappointed he's never been able to go somewhere on a bus with his classmates."

A survey of 789 branch leaders conducted by the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union in April found that only 53.4 percent of schools ran an overnight field trip in the past year. 

A quarter ran day trips only, and 7.2 percent had stopped all forms of off-campus activity. 

Of those surveyed, 89.6 percent said they were anxious about the prospect of criminal liability if an accident occurred.

The constant fear of lawsuits is also taking a toll on teachers' morale. 

“Many of us jokingly say that our retirement is not in our own hands, but in the hands of the students and parents we happen to meet,” Kim said. Kim herself developed a vestibular disorder this year that she attributes to stress.

Teachers alone take the fall 

Park Nam-gi, a professor emeritus of education of Gwangju National University of Education, traces the problem to how liability is structured.

In medicine and other professions, institutions absorb much of the legal risk when something goes wrong — however, teachers in Korea do not have that buffer, Park says. 

“A school trip or sports day is entirely optional, but if an accident happens and the teacher has to stake their career with no protection from the state, no rational person will take that risk,” Prof. Park said.

Without state assumption of accident liability and guaranteed immunity for teachers, he warned, schools will continue to choose the safety of doing nothing. 

President Lee Jae Myung addressed the pattern recently, saying that canceling field trips over liability fears was like “getting rid of the jar to avoid the maggots,” and ordered a comprehensive review of teacher liability and exemption rules. 

The situation points to a broader irony, where apartments adjacent to elementary schools — marketed under the colloquial term choppuma, shorthand for “elementary school-inclusive apartments” in Korean — consistently command higher prices than comparable units without that proximity.

“The gap can reach up to 100 million won ($69,000) for units of the same size in the same neighborhood,” said a Seoul-based real estate agent. “ Jeonse units nearest the school fill first at the start of each semester.”

Schools as service providers

Behind the complaints is a generational shift in how parents see their relationship with schools.

A policy paper by the Gyeonggi Institute of Education on elementary school parents born in the 1980s finds the dominant cohort — millennials — approach schools not through trust, but transaction.

Whereas previous generations sought a relationship with teachers built on emotional rapport, today's parents position themselves as consumers entitled to a service — and the school as the provider obligated to deliver it. 

Byun Young-im, a vice principal at an elementary school in Yongin, Gyeonggi, and a co-author of the paper, said the complaints that reach schools reflect a worldview in which individual children take precedence over the group to an extent that now overrides community norms. 

“A working parent, unable to attend sports day, filed a complaint requesting the event be closed to all parents, so that her child would not feel disadvantaged by her absence,” Byun told the Korea JoongAng Daily. “Even if an activity benefits the majority, if a parent decides their child is even slightly left out or at a disadvantage, the instinct is to push their own demands ahead of everyone else's.” 

These parents also organize and join forces digitally. 

What once required a walk to the principal's office now moves through group chats and online parent communities, turning individual grievances into coordinated pressure with unusual speed. 

The result, Byun said, is that schools find it impossible to meet the range of expectations placed on them, and have internalized the lesson that “doing nothing is the safest option.”

“Schools should be small societies where children learn to navigate conflict, to lose, to yield, but instead, they are being pushed into defensive choices that erase educational activities altogether — all in the name of managing risk,” she said. “And paradoxically, that retreat is what gets handed back to students.”

Kwak Geum-joo, professor emeritus of psychology at Seoul National University, says that children are paying the price. 

“Experiences outlast material gifts by a long measure,” she said. “Taking away these activities doesn't protect children. It takes away their right to form memories, and their chance to grow through failure.” 

BY SEO JI-EUN [[email protected]]