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Despite lacking an abundance of natural resources, Korea has enjoyed remarkable economic growth over the past decades and emerged as a leader in many fields worldwide thanks to the abundance of its rich human resources.
The rapid recovery of small country in Asia from the devastation of the Korean War to become an economic powerhouse in the world that has been benchmarked by many other countries is an amazing story.
Korea has produced much talent by investing a large chunk of its budget in education and by attempting to maximize efficiency by incorporating a cramming method to teach students.
While Korea's educational program has proven to be effective, today's educational issues still reveal a lot of drawbacks in the system as well.
Without question, Korean education has many benefits. An average high school accommodates about 300 to 400 students in each grade, with about 10 classes of approximately 40 students each.
When compared to countries in Northern Europe, these numbers are outstanding if we consider that a class in Northern Europe holds only about five to 10 students each.
By concentrating many students in the same space, Korea is able to educate many more students while employing the same number of teachers at every school.
That is to say, the more education Korea provides for students, the bigger the reward of producing brilliant students. Currently, it can be said that thousands of the so-called prodigy will lead Korea toward progress.
In addition, the Korean education system nurtures students to become versatile because of hard work and spirited competition among classmates. During exams, students need to master several subjects in detail to achieve high scores, which demands they study until late every night.
All subjects are important to Korean students. So they must take every opportunity they have to study as much as they can every subject of the school's curriculum.
However, there are also demerits. First, students do not receive in-depth, professional education unless they enter university or graduate school. The reason is that they study mostly so they can get good scores on their exams.
Usually, they tend not to study a subject fully enough to comprehend it deeply, but rather they are focused on learning it by rote only to do well on exams. The fundamental problem with this is that academic elitism prevails over Korean society.
Unless students enter selective universities such as the so-called SKY, they are bound to be ignored and unrecognized no matter how skillful and professional they might become. (SKY stands for Seoul National, Korea and Yonsei universities.)
Not to be outdone, students study as much as they can, cramming academic material into their minds, not caring about the true meaning of learning. This is why students remember only a fraction of what they have studied and even what they have achieved through their studies becomes useless in the end.
Besides undermining the true purpose of education, the educational system in Korea prevents students from developing creativity as well. Everyone learns the same material under the same curriculum except for at a few specialty schools, and there is not much respect given to individual characteristics.
What most schools in Korea want from their students is for them to act obediently according to school regulations and study what their teachers teach them. After all, nobody can deny that the educational environment in Korea hardly makes the students creative.
As mentioned above, to educate the students properly should be the cornerstone of national development in Korea. If a good educational system enables the cultivation of many creative and excellent citizens, Korea will become a better place to live.
This is why education reform is necessary in Korea. Rather than just pressing young children to study hard aimlessly, it is better for us to help them develop their own interests and skills by studying more independently and creatively.
It may difficult to reach a consensus on what the true purpose of education is, but I think that everyone will agree that Korea is still focused too much on results-oriented education.
Through trial and error, the students will fill in their gaps and strengthen their strong points. It is up to them how they will grow up as students of our nation, and as members of society.
Not that we should leave students alone completely and be indifferent to them, but it is more important to first make students learn how to enjoy studying and how to want to do it. The training of creative, self-motivated students will surely influence and benefits Korea in a countless ways.
Kim Min-sok is a second-year student at Gwacheon Foreign Language High School in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province.
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