OK – like most op-ed pieces in Korean newspapers, the logic is pretty specious, but this time I get the point, which is that "if Bill Gates been born in Korea," the poor state of the public education system would have prevented his star from rising. But then talking about the fact that he would have come of age in 1967 doesn't really help the argument, since lunchroom-sized computers were the last thing any Korean would have seen that year. Anyway...
The point is well made, by the way. The public school system here is failing – have any of you out there spent time in an average Korean school, because whoa – while those who can, to the extent that they can, take refuge in the private sector, the hagwon.
Those who are academically gifted are doing their best to actually leave the country, and I don't blame them. Any non-Koreans out there planning on sending their kids to an average Korean public school? I mean, there aren't guns or drug problems, right? Ahem.
And the talk about school violence, bullying, and even rape? Suicide being the #1 cause of death for young people? Kids starting to lose respect for their teachers and the system? Well, is anyone actually surprised? With all the pain, frustration, anger, and abuse that kids experience in the meat-grinder Korean education system – who is surprised that it's going to find expression in horrible ways?
Kids jumping off buildings. Girls beating other girls students and having male students rape her on camera and keep the tape as a blackmail tactic. What?
It's chickens coming home to roost. It's a brutal, development-era system that has completely lost its relevance in a more open, democratic society. It's the inevitable result of all the legions of utterly incompetent, selfish, and corrupt teachers, administrators, and school officials who are keep the system structurally inured against any sort of meaningful reform, since this would expose the fact of their incompetence, selfishness, and corruption.
Harsh? Well, as someone who has thought all this since first working in a Korean middle school in 1994 – and made this very prediction that the school system would come to a screeching, society-wrenching halt very soon – and has worked in two of Korea's "best" high schools and found they were run no better than the "worst", and have taught in top Korean universities and found them no better except for the quality of their facilities, that's my read of the situation.
A big storm's a-coming over the next 10 years for Korea, and I'll say what I've been saying for a few years now: Korean schools are undergoing such serious "value deflation" that what has already happened to Korean graduate schools (you can't get a decent professorial job in Korea without a foreign Ph.D.) is going to happen on the undergraduate level as the bleeding of the best minds out of Korea via the foreign language high schools is going to accelerate.
The government is doing its best to clamp the flow, but those with the means are getting the hell out of dodge.
12 years ago, almost no general people aside from a few of the elite knew about my my undergraduate alma mater, Brown University, let alone my boarding school.
Now, Brown is the booby prize for kids trying to go to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. Now, Koreans are flooding not only the secondary prep schools, but even the middle school and elementary boarding schools as well, since there's a better chance to get into the top schools from an earlier age.
Top schools like Ewha Womens' and Yonsei have special internal programs that act like the foreign language high school, except within the college, where classes are ostensibly conducted in English. FLHS kids are essentially applying to these FLHS-in-a-schools to continue the hamster wheel of "international" education, of which the logical extension is simply more kids who are leaving the country. The ones who did not are generally the ones who could not – no bones about that.
The government is passing an English-only law for its schools that will only further diminish the already poor state of Korean academia by not allowing non-English professors to teach their subjects in their native tongues.
Oh, I could go on.
I try to do what I can, teaching my history course and trying to jumpstart a few minds into actually starting to think, analyze, and criticize. But even the few of us out there who even have the rare chance to do that and not be treated like walking dictionaries (foreigners) or dreamy idealists (Korean teachers who haven't had the inspiration beaten out of them yet) – our efforts are, in the big picture, doomed.
Ah, depressing but true. I'll continue to fight the good fight, but hardly anyone, save the few students who will remember and appreciate me when they finally come out of their test-induced haze a few years from now, will even notice.
Sigh.
