I’m a teacher, so I have a lot to say about education, particularly having taught in two countries. This is the first installment in a series of blog posts about education.
There’s no denying the fact that there are serious flaws in the American educational system. Over the past few decades, our public schools have pretty consistently failed to prepare a significant portion of our students for life beyond high school. The average American public school system is bogged down by issues like ineffective methods of assessment, disappointing attendance statistics, crime, substance abuse, oceans of paperwork, and exhausted, overwhelmed, and underpaid classroom teachers. Over the past decade, anyone with eyes to see should have concluded that high stakes testing and accountability based curricula (as we have interpreted and implemented them) have done little more than produce a generation of over-tested students who are more comfortable with a multiple choice bubble sheet than with authentic human interaction, discussion, or debate. And, even more disturbingly, this rigid accountability markers encourage schools to play numbers games, practice that (even with not ethically questionable) redefine rosters and sometimes alter student demographic and educational information in order to give the school the best statistical chance of meeting whatever markers a group of politicians have defined as proficiency. This all or nothing, high stakes policy is no way to measure the abilities and aptitudes of people, who grow, learn, and change at different rates.
For a little while now, there have been mumblings about the need to privatize educational systems. As best I can tell, the proponents of this concept use economic reasoning to support their belief. They rationalize that private schools would engage in the same healthy competition that currently drives private industry. School would be inspired to streamline, to provide a better, more cost-effective “product” in the hopes of attracting more and higher-paying “clientele”. With a system that encourages competition between schools, theoretically institutions would improve and evolve or go under.
This entire concept, even in its watered-down voucher iteration, has never sat well with me. I don’t get patriotic about much, but I think access to a free, public education is one of the most beautiful and democratic things about our country. Our public schools really are one of the few places in many communities where classes and races mix, where the child of poverty, of color, of a single parent home, has the opportunity to sit at the same table and read from the same books as the child of privilege. And yes, I know that this doesn’t always happen, that public schools, particularly those in urban areas, still struggle with issues of equity and access. But I still see a free, public school as one of the last arenas where, if we get it right, this kind of social justice is possible. These philosophical ideals of equity and access helped form and have driven my opposition to the privatization of American education. In short, it may be capitalist, but it’s not democratic.
However, this past year has added a new dimension to my belief in the separation of school and commerce. Since July I have (obviously) lived in Korea and taught at a private English academy here. My experiences here have convinced me that business models have no place in effective, equitable education.
Some time during the rapid westernization that gave birth to the Asian Tiger, South Korea effectively privatized its educational system without actually privatizing education. That is to say, public schools still exist in Korea and students are still required to attend them. In fact, the concept of dropping out of school essentially does not exist here, which I credit more to the students’ home experiences and complete terror of disappointing their families than to anything the schools are doing. So everyone goes to school, but any student who wants to go to a good college (and they all want to go to a good college) doesn’t just go to public school. Some opportunistic businessman a decade or so ago convinced the Korean populace that private supplemental academies were necessary for their students’ academic success. And these parents bought in—big.
Nowadays, from what I hear from students and other teachers, most of the college preparatory education takes place in these academies, called hagwons. This is especially true with English language acquisition, a skill that is essential for admission into a good college and for many careers. (For example, Korean flight attendants must be proficient in English and Korean to work for any of the major carriers here. Many also speak Japanese or Chinese.) Somewhere along the line, the Korean public schools became too overwhelmed or underfunded to teach English or many other subjects at an accelerated level or to provide remediation for struggling students. The hagwon system, seeing a chance to make big bucks, evolved to fill this void. Now almost every Korean child goes to some type of academy; the average child attends two or three.
So, what exactly goes on at these private academies? How has profit reshaped the Korean educational experience? That, my friends, will all be revealed (in the same opinionated and fairly biased tone) in Part 2 of this commentary.
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