Sewol happened. Death toll surpassing 150, will continue to climb when they find them. It’s a tragedy, and I don’t care about your opinion on why it happened. The tragedy made worse because MOST of them were children. Young adults getting ready to show their potential.
Let’s talk about school trips. Why do we keep doing it? When I was a kid, I loved school trips cause we could bum around for the whole time. Teachers loves school trips cause they can get out of the dredge of teaching. Did any “education” happen. Not quite sure.
In my 6 years of running the hagwon, I have performed exactly 3 school trips. Every single time I questioned it’s effect vs. the costs. After the third one I simply decided it was not worth the effort, energy and money it took to get them organized. I still stand by the idea that schools should NOT organize school trips, for the simple reason that the people organizing it do not have the proper experience in organizing such a thing, especially with children in tow. They also do not have the proper motivation to keep the children safe, like parents. Most of the time there are also not enough adults to keep the students in check.
It doesn’t make any sense. Never has, never will.
Parents always resist school trips, they have a huge number of questions regarding safety, or even the effectiveness of the trip. I do not advocate Mother Goose tactics when dealing with children, but putting a big bunch of kids in one small room with few adults around is asking for trouble. When chaos erupts, kids loose all sense of direction and each child needs 100% attention of the adult, or even two. Then why would you send 10 kids per adult? Just keeping the kids focused on what is going around them takes a lot of energy.
The only thing that has been successful and effective are the language holidays, but, these are organized in such a manner that kids are either in a safe place, or a place where they get all the attention they need. 300 kids on a boat? I think not.
The waste is immeasurable, the pain, unbearable.
