South Korea is well known for its distinctive, sometimes excessive, enthusiasm for education. This education fever is derived from South Koreans’ concern with the pursuit of education as a way of achieving socioeconomic status and power; and thus, competitions to score well on tests have been valorized in South Korea. Now that English has become the language of power and opportunity in South Korea, this paper aims to examine how education fever has empowered bottom-up de facto English language policy over top-down English language policy. By referring to Cooper’s, Language planning and social change. Cambridge University Press (1989) and Kaplan and Baldauf’s, Language planning: From practice to theory. Multilingual Matters (1997) frameworks, this paper interprets private education in South Korea serving as bottom-up de facto policy, which exercises greater influence on how language policy is developed in practice than the top-down statement can.