Teachers Running Rampant

By Jason Lim

``Unfit, Foulmouthed, Drunken English Teachers Running Rampant."

This is how Korea Beat, a self-styled English-language Korean news blog, translated the headline for a Yonhap News story on June 11 about problems with native English-speaking teachers in Korea. A more literal translation of the headline would have been, ``Native Speakers of Questionable Quality Abound." However, once you read the story, Korea Beat's translation is actually more accurate in terms of both the content and tone of the article.

The article is a sensationalist hack job. It unashamedly caters to, and reinforces, the ingrained negative public preconceptions of native-speaker teachers.

There is barely a pretense of serious journalism. It only cites two statistics, both from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. Firstly, the number of native-speaker English teachers jumped by 3,000 over two years from 2006 to 2008 as a result of the government's rapid expansion policy of native-speaker English classroom education.

Secondly, 54 teachers quit without notice or resigned ― all for various reasons ― during the first four months of last year. Despite the ministry's claim that this number is negligible, the article disagrees with the ministry's own interpretation of its numbers. To prove its case, the article goes on to extrapolate the number of teachers who quit in a year to about 160 by arbitrarily multiplying it by three. That's 160 who quit out of a total of 5,417 teachers for an annual attrition rate of 2.9 percent.

It's no secret that workforce attrition will be much higher during the first few months of a job since people will be inevitably adjusting their initial expectations to the realities of the job. After the initial bump, the attrition rate tends to level off until it finds a happy equilibrium. This doesn't just happen here ― it's the case in all industries. Therefore, a straight-line extrapolation of the kind used in the article is totally unfounded.

Also, even if we take the article's calculations at face value, less than 3-percent attrition over the course of the year is certainly not bad considering the significant cultural adaptation challenges posed by native-speaker jobs in Korea, especially since many of these jobs are in rural areas. I would actually call that a resounding success.

Unfortunately, the numbers ― as miscalculated as they are ― are not the main problem. The article gleefully cites the most outrageous cases of teacher misconduct to highlight the gross incompetence, negligence and outright lies involving native-speaker teachers. As an example, it tells of a middle school teacher from Great Britain who came in drunk and began to verbally abuse the students using words they didn't understand. One teacher supposedly told the class, ``The reason I'm not married is I don't want to have kids like you,'' and ``Dokdo is Japanese," while teaching sex education.

Gasp. This is indeed outrageous. Well, at least he didn't say Takeshima. That would have been unbearable and could have caused lasting psychological scars on these defenseless junior high school students. I did have one question, though: If the children didn't understand what the teacher was saying, how did they tell the adults what was actually said?

The article also lists other cases that are sufficiently shocking and disgraceful enough to deserve prime real estate in any British tabloid worth its name. But enough. Granted, the cases are probably not made up, but that's not the point; there is a bigger issue here than just bad and sensationalist journalism. The bigger issue is racism.

This article is not a search for the truth but a list of disparate episodes that have been connected in such a way as to create a narrative that is unjustified, inaccurate and dishonest. It's alarmist. Worse, it's outright racist because it attributes certain failings ― in this case, nothing less than a failure of character ― to a whole group of people based on the actions of a few individuals because they bear superficial physical resemblance, come from comparable cultural backgrounds, or share a similar language skill set.

This is unfortunate because such an attitude goes directly against the Korea Inc. stated attempt to transition itself into a diverse, multicultural and engaged workforce, ready to excel in a global environment.

The business case for diversity is easy to make. It's all about inclusive participation, inviting everyone into the problem-solving and decision-making processes, so as to take advantage of a multitude of opinions and perspectives. This would lead to more informed and creative solutions, while developing employees who are more committed and motivated to achieve the solutions that they helped create.

With an overwhelmingly export-dependent economy, the necessity for inclusive diversity in Korea is extremely acute. Otherwise, how is Korea Inc. supposed to understand the needs and wants of its international customer base and make relevant products over the long run?

This is not just a matter of adding color to the boardrooms or assembly lines. It requires a fundamental shift in viewing non-Koreans as full partners to be treated fairly and equally rather than as outsiders to be prejudged and automatically suspected.

This is not an easy task. No one has the right to be self-righteous about this. Korea's national and ethnic culture is based on a strong sense of homogeneity, which arose mainly out of the need to survive while maintaining ethnic identity over several millennia.

But, as is often the case in the history of civilizations, what helped you survive yesterday can actually doom you today. Being unfairly racist against the very teachers who are teaching your kids the international language of our times is not an optimal survival strategy in today's global age.

Jason Lim is the managing editor of the Korea Policy Review published at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He can be reached at jasonlim2000@gmail.com.