Is This The System We Want To Emulate?

[Hannah Bell]

President Obama likes to point to South Korea as one of the countries we should emulate when it comes to education policy:

DAEJEON, South Korea — It has been a sad and gruesome semester at South Korea’s most prestigious university, and with final exams beginning Monday the school is still reeling from the recent suicides of four students and a popular professor... anxious school psychologists have expanded their counseling services since the suicides. The school president also rescinded a controversial policy that humiliated many students by charging them extra tuition if their grades dipped.

... the Kaist student council issued an impassioned statement that said “a purple gust of wind” had blown through campus. “Day after day we are cornered into an unrelenting competition that smothers and suffocates us,” the council said. “We couldn’t even spare 30 minutes for our troubled classmates because of all our homework. We no longer have the ability to laugh freely.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/world/asia/23southkorea.html?_r=1&hp

And just in case you think the unhappiness is isolated to just one university campus, here is more from the Times:

Young people in South Korea are a chronically unhappy group. A recent survey found them to be — for the third year in a row — the unhappiest subset among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...The competition for a place in a leading university begins in middle school for most South Korean students....

http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2011/05/is-this-system-we-want-to-emulate.html



*****


Last year the Education Ministry decided that 70 percent of questions on the national college entrance exam would be based on lessons carried on the government-funded Educational Broadcasting System, providing a strong incentive for students to tune in.

One of EBS’s on-air personalities is Brian Rhee, whose sister, Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor, became the face of U.S. education reform.

The 39-year-old Korean American moved to his parents’ home town more than a decade ago to learn Korean and pursue an acting career. Along the way, he found steady work as an English teacher.

In 2008, he opened his own cram school and encouraged parents to think beyond the next test, to skills their children will need for a globalized world. And while many academies assign three-page vocabulary lists, he gave students a half-dozen words to practice. “I wanted to take some of the pressure off these kids,” he said. But parents doubted his approach and he closed the doors last spring.

http://www.rheefirst.com/?p=661


There is a little bit of Good News. South Korean officials don't want kids kept in school past 10 p.m so patrols wander the streets looking for illegal cramming.

http://www.susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=9655.

[lostnfound]

1. WHAT s it that we want? What is the goal of education?

To produce students capable of understanding themselves and the world they live in?
To create stress on children and families until they become accustomed to abuse and the complete absence of autonomy?
To inoculate kids against finding their own paths off the beaten track?
To brainwash a set of core consumer and corporatist as furniture in the mind?

[blindpig]

2. It is to produce a small set of professionals and managers...

to service the ruling class and manage society for their benefit and a large group of compliant workers/consumers.

Such is the role of education in capitalist society, the requirements of the ruling class are paramount.

[Scruffy1]

3. Very well said. n/t

[Brickbat]

4. K&R.