Hagwon Culture in Korea

By Kim Jeom-ok

It's been almost a year now since the National Statistical Office and the Education Ministry carried out a fairly comprehensive survey of the state of ``parallel education" (cram schools, private tutoring, online classes etc.) in our country.

The survey revealed that 77 percent of students depend on parallel education, for which their parents spent 20.4 trillion won last year alone, which is close to one 10th of the country's total budget. This huge financial burden that parents have to bear for the education of their children is a serious testimony to the quality of education rendered by our public education system (elementary, middle and high schools).

Far from promoting the academic interest of our students in a satisfactory way, the public education system has made the situation worse: It has created a situation in which people are first forced to eat poor food at home and then go out in search of better food.

Parallel education plays a very important role ― if not more so ― than public education, in the Korean education system. The fact that 77 percent of students go for parallel education and parents pay for it through their nose shows two things. It's a clear indication that regular education leaves much to be desired. Secondly, parallel education has succeeded in fulfilling the gap created by the poor quality of public education.

Students going in for parallel education represent all varieties of students, from very brilliant to below-average students, meaning there is mass dissatisfaction with the quality of education paid for by taxpayer money. This alarming situation calls for immediate action.

A few years ago in an attempt to address the problem, the school hours were extended to prevent students from attending ``hagwon," or private cram institutes. The argument given was that students from low-income families couldn't afford private teaching, and thus they have an unfair advantage against students from wealthier families.

The so-called solution to the problem has proven to be worse than the disease. The popularity of parallel education has increased. The students from less affluent families have not been benefited, they're worse off. Students whose parents can afford extra coaching have even more difficult lives, staying at school until late, followed by private coaching until 9 or 10 p.m. ― when they are physically and mentally exhausted. Instead of having extended hours, regular schools should have truncated hours and let students go where their academic goals are best served.

An elementary school student whose English is better than an average high school student's ― and there is no dearth of such examples ― must not be forced to stay in a class where he or she is not likely to learn anything. As for the protection of students from comparatively economically weaker segments of society, they should be given scholarships to attend private classes so that they're on a level playing field. Shorter school hours would result in savings that could be used for scholarships based on merit and means.

According to the survey, a majority of our students depend on private tutoring for English ― the main rub. Our policy makers have implicit faith in the efficacy of native speakers of English. The belief that every native speaker of English can succeed in our classroom is fallacious.

ELT (English Language Teaching) is a profession like any other profession, and its success or failure depends on formal qualifications, training and experience, and to send our kids to quacks is academically suicidal. While there are some native speakers ― even if untrained and without any necessary qualifications and training ― whose performance has been found satisfactory; by and large, these economic migrants ― with little commitment to the profession and less in the job assigned to them ― cannot deliver the goods.

Our mistake is that we fail to realize that English is an international language, and non-native speakers of English today far exceed the number of native speakers. In some Commonwealth countries, for example, English as a second language far exceeds the importance of native languages and people use English there as their primary language of function. English in these countries has been cultivated there by native resources without the interference of native speakers.

It is this variety of English which is shaping the future of English, not as a regional variety of English, but as the English of international communication. Hundreds and thousands of phone inquiries, not just from America, but from all over the world, are received at call centers in remote parts of India, eloquent evidence that our dependence on native speakers of English is erroneous.

It's time we changed our rules and invite ELT experts from all over the world and not just half a dozen countries. If we cast a wider net, we have better chances of finding real experts instead of numerous quacks.

The writer is an English instructor at YWCA in Yeosu, South Jeolla Province. She can be reached at motivations@hanmail.net