A Korean education civic group vowed Tuesday to lead a nationwide anti-academic elitism movement aimed to discourage the country’s excessive reliance on private education.

The World Without Worry About Shadow Education said it launched a signature-collecting campaign to seek a law that legally mandates companies not to discriminate against applicants based on their academic backgrounds.

The aim of the project is to ultimately root out what they said was the fundamental cause of Korea’s excessive private education burden, according to the organization.

“The fundamental cause of the burden of private education is not the education itself, but social problems such as the admission system of colleges or the way the job market works. Most parents recognize that there is discrimination among schools in the recruitment process,” said organization head Song In-soo.

“As the largest hurdle for students and job seekers tends to be academic background, individuals invest money and time to getting admission into prestigious schools. Students consequently attempt to follow the elite academic cycle of going to an English kindergarten, private elementary school, international middle school and elite high school,” he said.

According to government statistics office Statistics Korea’s annual survey from 2009 to 2013, the majority of the respondents picked the “importance of a school’s name value in the job market” as the reason for spending money on private education.

The grade-oriented admission system of elite schools and the prevalent culture of ranking schools stood at second and third, respectively.

While carrying out the signature-collecting campaign with 100,000 individuals to seek the anti-academic elitism law, the organization will receive reports of any discrimination cases and monitor the recruitment processes of the public sector, it added.

It will also try to dissuade the media from covering rankings of schools.

The group, also known as World Without Worries About Private Education, has been preparing for the campaign launch since 2014 through a series of discussions, surveys and studies on the school discrimination ban.

By Lee Hyun-jeong  (rene@heraldcorp.com)