한국사람들이 폄하하는 한국교육

After reading the article about the criticism towards Korean education system from the Korean student South Korea's 'Top Performance' Numbers Should Not Be Applauded

I also as a student from South Korea don’t fully agree with the author.

 

First, Korean’s overall suicide rate recently becomes the highest among the OECD, but most of them were over 60 years-old elderly people, and youth suicide rate is not that high as other developed countries. In addition, yes, students have had suicidal thoughts because of stress from the study, but there are various other reasons behind, mostly family troubles. And not only Korean students but also other countries where the academic achievement is highly valued for the future success commit suicide because of the academic stress or failure and, subsequently, they feel less happiness at school. On the other hand, generally speaking, where there’s no relationship between academic success and career, there’s no academic stress and, thus, they are happy at school.

 

Also, many people point out that the higher score of Korean students is due to spending lots of money on private tutoring, but many international comparison study didn’t find the relationship between private tutoring and achievement yet. Of course such an educational system based on the competition like Korea fattens private tutoring markets, but, behind that, Korean government allocates relatively lower educational budget than other OECD countries which show similar students’ achievement, so if we add the budget from the individuals and the budget from the government, in case of Korea, it’s similar with, for instance, Finnish government’s budget allocation in education, thus it is better to interpret this situation as individuals spend lots of money on the private markets for their children instead of the government. However, if you argue it in the aspect of inequality, it can be true (not absolutely true), and I agree that this private sector must be integrated with public system for students’ equality. But, you can’t use this private tutoring as the evidence of high achievement, since we can’t measure contributiveness of each yet.

 

Lastly, not only Korean education system but also overall Korean society are not well prepared for disadvantaged groups yet. Usually, educational welfare follows after societal welfare, thus it’s not the problem stemmed from the education but more accountable for undeveloped citizenship or system for the weak. Hence, it is unreasonable to devalue Korean students’ success based on societal problem. This criticism must target Korean society or government, not school or student.

 

I as a Korean studied for more than 20 years from the elementary to the graduate school don’t prefer Korean educational system and don’t think it as the best in the world, but it is not fare to measure the system based on unproven evidences as the author did. Koreans are hard workers and so do students and teachers even though they didn’t get Novel prizes yet (and never?). But, again, I don’t think it as the ideal educational model since there’s the road far less traveled to be perfect.