Daeil Overseas Studies Program (DOSP)

This article is taken from:  http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200711/200711060025.html. This explains why there is so much private institute dependencies. I’m not saying any education system is perfect, but I think the US has an edge, because the government does not interfere as much as the Korean government.

President Roh Moo-hyun’s son is attending business school in the U.S., and the president’s son-in-law is also going to law school there. Grand National Party presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak sent three of his four children to schools in the U.S. United New Democratic Party presidential candidate Chung Dong-young sent his son to a private school in the U.S. and then to a prestigious university there as well. There is nothing wrong with sending one’s children to good schools overseas. It is human nature to want to provide a good education for one’s sons, daughters and sons-in-law. This is something Koreans agree upon.

The key to resolving Korea’s educational problems is in finding a way to provide affordable and quality education in this country — the kind the president and presidential candidates were able to offer their children — regardless of financial or social status. How can that be done? It can be done by strengthening public education. If the educational pledges being made by the candidates fail to address the need to normalize public education, then they are fooling voters.

UNDP candidate Chung has announced a campaign pledge to replace the College Scholastic Ability Test with high school graduation competency tests, while banning universities from administering their own essay tests. Chung intends to use the new tests to determine whether a student is fit to receive a high school diploma. And universities will use not only grades, but extracurricular activities such as volunteer work, special interest activities and leadership work as standards to use in admitting new students.

If things go as Chung plans, pretty soon public education as we know it will cease to exist. In Korea’s present educational system, no teacher is encouraged to excel. Due to a curve system, 4 percent of all students fall into the 1 level category, while another 7 percent fall into the level 2 group. Teachers are not allowed to provide extra lessons to students who fall behind or to offer in-depth classes to gifted students. That’s because when one student’s academic rank goes up, another one’s rank will drop. To be called fair, a teacher must stand on the sidelines and just watch without emotional attachment. In the end, the parents and students bear all of the consequences of poor education rather than the teachers or the schools.

Chung’s educational reform pledge threatens to lower the quality of public education, which affects the children of ordinary Koreans and lower-income families. Wealthy Koreans and those in high places can simply send their children away to schools in other countries. And Chung’s educational reform plan threatens the very existence of special purpose high schools and self-supporting high schools, which were islands of quality schooling in Korea’s barren educational landscape. If Chung’s plan becomes reality, then parents will be forced to send their children to schools with relatively lower grade point averages that will be easier for their kids to succeed in. Such a policy is like forcing parents to leave the country with their children in search of better education.

In order to improve public education, schools and teachers must be allowed to compete in terms of the quality of their classes. We must let schools and teachers race against each other to come up with lessons that develop the abilities of students. Quality schooling must be available in Korea in order to keep ordinary parents from looking at overseas schools, like the president and presidential candidates did, and instead open the way for top-notch education to be received here in this country. This is what true educational reform should be all about.