BONUS POINTS: If you get to the end of this essay, you get to hear me attempt my first academic lecture in Korean. For those of you who can understand it, it should prove to be a worthy little piece of amusement.
Let me start this little essay by saying outright that Korean society is so deeply mired in a mixture of intense development-era competitiveness, runaway "education fever," and deeply-entrenched sadaejuui (사대주의) – that is, a nearly slavish mode of deference to a perceived superior culture – that it is getting to the point where it barely knows up from down, shit from shinola.
The new drives to have all university courses in Korea taught in English is about the dumbest fucking idea since Pookie starting sucking the "glass dick" in New Jack City.
Korea, oh beloved "Land of the Morning Calm" – please put down the English crack pipe and go get help.
As a non-native speaker of Korean and native speaker of English who has lectured and taught in Korea's top universities, and in a subject that was in English but was not English – history, social science, and translation – I will say that what the Korean academy needs is not another swift kick in the nuts and something else to make it harder for native Koreans to be effective academics in their own language in their own country while privileging the privileged who are able to live and study overseas.
Korean society and Korean people in general spend soooooooo much money and social energy in a self-created web of English-related inefficient education and artificial worry that it is nearly crippling. People spend good chunks of their salaries toiling away in a hagwon system with no standardization or universal levels of achievement or promotion in order to take tests for jobs that mostly don't require much knowledge of English, that being the TOEIC.
Let me reiterate here what everyone already knows – your TOEIC score is usually required as a standard of promotion for jobs that have require no real English skills. I have a revolutionary proposal? What about a test related to duties performed on the job?
The reality is that English language ability has been conflated with intelligence, or at least academic ability, both problematic standards for jobs that generally require answering phones, shuffling papers, and other duties that are generally easily learned on the job. Yes, there are jobs that require communicating with foreign clients, or working with documents in English, but the vast majority don't.
This is but one example of the huge engine that drives the English industry in this country.
But WHY? This is the question that development and progress-frenzied Korea rarely asks. But I'm not even going to go much further in that direction. I'm just going to talk practically, not theoretically today.
Instead of driving another nail into the coffin – or to use another colorful metaphor – instead of adding more ballast to the sinking ship that is the Korean eduction system, the pressure point being pushed in society should not be the average Korean professor, but several other places:
- Don't push English-only at the universities, across subjects that shouldn't be taught in English (no one likes hearing this, but the academic level of Korean universities overall is already low enough, without being forced to adhere to the lowest-common-denominator of non-English professors' English skills) – push English-only for English teachers in English classrooms in middle and secondary schools. Yeah, I know it's already a rule, but it's a joke and never enforced.
- Wake up from the English "haze" and start making positions for non-Korean native speakers of English who are not English teachers but can teach other subjects. There are always some of us here, but we always end up leaving Korea because there's nothing else to teach but English. Sounds crazy, right? Well, guess what – the majority of people in "외국" aren't English teachers! And the few of us who might like to – and are qualified to – teach courses in Sociology, History, or Anthropology actually have few places for us in Korea. Then you'd have qualified foreign teachers and professors teaching subjects in English that will take off pressure to do so from Korean professors.
- Regulate and make universal standards in the hagwons! So much energy is wasted on the revolving door of Korean citizen taking a grammar class here, speaking class there, then dropping out because it's ineffective, rolling back in ability, then repeating the cycle all over again. If you can't create curriculums, at least you could make universal standards for gradated certification tests, to which many of the hagwons would start teaching. Then maybe some of the pressure could be taken off of the single-sitting TOEIC and spread throughout more regular and nuanced level tests whose main function is to simply promote to certain levels. Then, instead of hagwons making up their own level tests and evaluations, people could just be placed according to their non-binding level certifications. Use standardized testing – by creating and standardizing them – to society's advantage for once!
The whole point here is that Korean society is going so English-crazy that it is starting to hurt and embarrass itself, even as its citizens are bending over backwards, spending inordinate amounts of time and money chasing a pipe dream. The result? In a country that is already pretty English-friendly and filled with decent English speakers:
- Why is the standard for self-evaluation of one's English is that of a native speaker of the language? I speak almost exxlusively in Korean with Koreans, and it's interesting to note that when they sometimes hear me speak English with other American friends or when I pick up the phone, they often say that they envy that I "speak English so well." Umm, I'm a native speaker. I don't speak it "well." Then some people want to know "how to speak like a native speaker." I say, "You can't. Ever. Until the day you die. And I'll never speak Korean like a native speaker." The point is – why is a native speaker's level of fluency the standard, instead of the level of English appropriate to how it is used in one's life or career? And this is mostly from Korean speakers of English who are already quite good. It seems that the more English one speaks, the less satisfied one is with the level of speech.
- Why is the expectation always that Koreans in Korea should speak English in non-English education-related environments, instead of foreigners living in Korea to speak Korean? I'm not saying to pass laws "Korean-only" laws or such nonsense, but it smacks of toadyism when people cower in the sight of foreigners, stumbling over English learned in schoolbooks, then apologize for "not speaking well." Why are Koreans apologizing to foreigners for not being "good" English speakers in their own country? Shouldn't there be some expectation that foreigners speak Korean, instead of treating every white man who utters "annyeonghaseyo" like an alabaster god descended from the heavens?
- Why does the government believe that by not fixing its broken system of English-language education, while simply putting new pressures on the production end of that system, is going to do anything by expose more of its cracks, accentuate existing inequalities, and generally make life more miserable than it already is in this "education fever" afflicted nation?
It really is like smoking crack. It's a short-term fix that's going to be long-term harmful. And it may even feel or look good for a short time, but it's gonna hurt for much longer.
The Korean government has already done quite a bit to fuck up theoretically good ideas with short-sighted, bballi bballi, ill-thought practice. See my previous rants on the matters of how not to integrate foreign teachers into Korean public schools, or how to best work to cripple the few elite schools in this country in the name of jealousy and if-my-kid-can't-no-one-else-should, "배 아퍼" thinking:
EPIK as Case Study: Why Korean-Style Management Sucks
If this new initiative goes through, it'll add more energy to the existing contradictions in this society, especially in terms of added pressure to attend foriegn language high schools, increase the pressure for private tutoring even more, and most important of all:
The value of a Korean Ph.D., which is already such that such will guarantee you never being able to teach in a top-tier Korean university as a Korean, will truly be shit. Effectively, in order to meet these unrealistic requirements, foreign Ph.D.'s will become next-to-required, and will of course increase the pressure on prospective graduate students to study in foreign graduate schools, since one is probably going to be better off with a lower-tier graduate degree from the US than a Ph.D. in Economics from Seoul National.
That process is already well underway; this new policy will be the final nail in the coffin.
And look at the quality of international graduate programs, which already conduct all their courses in English. Only 2% of them actually have entered international organizations.
I see the entire project of English education as a giant treadmill with no real destination. Yeah, the overall level of English in Korean society will marginally increase, mostly as a result of the huge rise of English "education fever" temperatures with only marginal effect.
But this education fever being raged inside the body of the Korean republic is slowly killing the patient, and the only real effects I see in the near future of ingesting this "remedy" is that of completely gutting the organ of Korean higher education, even as it drags the others to eventual overload and failure.
The question is: Where does this crazed race on the treadmill really get Korea, even as anti-foreign sentiment drives out foreign companies and investors? Lately, the obsession with English and the errors of kneejerk nationalism are really acting to hurt the nation, much more than help it.
But I guess the problem will only really be apparent after a clear divide has developed between Koreans with preferred foreign and denigrated domestic college degrees, former Korean hagwon teachers, with more word-of-mouth power than any Ministry of Culture and Tourism, return to their home countries to spread news of how xenophobic Korea is but is yet a good place to make a buck, or as more foreign companies find China a less hostile investor environment than Korea – and cheaper, to boot.
But I'm just a foreign blogger talking "negative" about Korea, right? I'll continue to sound the alarm bell, but no one's really listening, I think. Yet, I write in the hope that someone will, while keeping my higher English skills in good enough shape to get a professorship in a university back home after I get my doctorate.
BONUS:
I end this essay with the promise of self-flagellating abuse – I recorded a lecture I recently delivered to a group of undergraduate American Studies majors who had invited me to a recent conference they had put on, in which I talked about the future of African-American representation in the US. Since they were mostly from universities outside of Seoul proper, their English language ability would have been a pretty significant barrier to my delivering the lecture, so I thought this would be the perfect time to try and deliver most of the lecture in Korean.
I flub and repeat myself in the heat of this ongoing moment, and even have my brain cloud over long enough to forget which country Barack Obama's dad was from while using him as an example, but I also tackled the problem of protected speech under the First Amendment, affirmative action, and other grave-sounding topics.
Since I record all my lectures now as a way of keeping myself honest and in as good lecturing form as circumstance allow – self-recording all academic presentations is a new rule of mine – I thought I'd share with you all my little triumph while using it to make a point:
Even qualified academics who can give lectures in Korean have no real place in Korean academia, no matter how specialized the practitioner. I'd be better off using my skills on Korean TV, which has been an option I've turned down several times and will continue to turn down.
I was recently offered a spot on an Arirang TV talk show (never!), even as the Hanguk University of Foreign Studies didn't reoffer me (nor even inform me of the fact, even after several phone calls) my position as a lecturer in Introduction to American Culture (a class I really loved teaching, even at 32,000 won per hour, 2 hours a week, so no – not much reason to teach outside of pure love), even though I was one of the highest-rated classes in the school, as students would constantly tell me. But since I had taken a break for a semester – they had asked me to teach "Introduction to English Culture" and I had respectfully declined, since I knew as much about England as your average Austin Powers fan – I think the next person who took over the desk in the department literally forgot I existed, or there must have been some other embarrassing reason for not rehiring me and then not telling me I wasn't rehired.
The English department never returned my phone calls. I found out I wouldn't be teaching the next semester from students emailing me as to why someone else's name was listed under the course listing.
Nice and professional, Waedae.
I think I'll be eventually taking my skills and credentials back to where they'll benefit me and be appreciated. I'm not lamenting this, though, to complain about my situation – I'm more than fine and I'm doing a lot of projects that are keeping me here and happy for the time being. But in the end, I think it's pretty sad that the best options for some of the most academically qualified foreigners in Korea are still teaching English to little kids who live in expensive Kangnam apartments.
'Cause I certainly wasn't teaching my little class in Waedae for the money.
Ah, well – I guess I'll just chalk it up to being reminded the hard way that even academic and professional recognition is something I won't find in Korea, where a black Ph.D. candidate with an Ivy League degree and is conversationally fluent in Korean can barely get a job in a hagwon. Well, maybe if I knew somebody, I'd get an interview, right? Hehe.
And a hagwon will be the only place that, if the Korean government gets its way, a Korean Ph.D. holder will be able to find gainful employment.
