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By Kim Tae-gyu

Staff Reporter

The Korean government has come up with a policy aimed at supporting the country's science prodigies for their entire lifetimes.

The Ministry of Science and Technology on Thursday unveiled the scheme in a report to President Roh Moo-hyun at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

``We will establish a system of discovering our potential science prodigies and support them throughout their lives,'' Vice Minister of Science and Technology Innovation Park Jong-koo said.

``Toward that end, we will strengthen university-affiliated science educational institutes across the country. We will also develop next-generation textbooks,'' Park said.

Also included in the ambitious plan is a way to help outstanding scientists even beyond retirement.

``We hope all these steps will encourage our young students to choose science and engineering majors in the future,'' Park said.

Korea has suffered the disturbing trend of young students' shunning science and engineering majors over the past few years.

Some experts are opposed to the tendency in the country's education system to focus on fact memorization to get good scores in a test, which is necessary to enter universities.

Under such a mindset, they are suggesting a new campaign to overhaul the fact-based education system into a discovery-based one, named La Main a la pate (LAMPA), a French term that translates roughly to ``practicing on their own.''

The campaign, which is geared toward getting students more involved in scientific activities themselves, was first initiated in France in 1996 and later extended to the United States, China and Vietnam, to name a few.

However, the suggestions have failed to gain support from schools and students here who are still busy memorizing scientific formulas or facts to take college entrance exams.