Reconsider the Direction of Education
Dear editor,
Regarding the June 26 editorial, ``Costly Yet Uncompetitive," I strongly agree with the story that President Lee Myung-bak and his administration should enhance the educational quality of public high schools to reduce private tutoring expenses.
However, prior to mentioning the quality of public school, they have to consider the contradictions of educational policies and try to reform irrationality of them, because the soaring private tutoring cost arises from an inconsistency in the policies.
One of President Lee's election pledges was to increase self-regulatory schools, which are regarded as another specialized school. Like any specialized schools, parents and students think there are more chances to enter good universities from those schools.
So, it drives them to turn toward private education to enter these schools. It is a contradictory idea to carry out promoting elite schools while curbing private tutoring at the same time.
Moreover, the standardized tests administered by the Education Ministry are a motive for increasing private education. The aim of the exam is checking students' basic proficiency abilities and giving more support to underachievers.
The ministry insisted the scores weren't unveiled and the students were informed whether they had reached the basic scholastic levels in each subject. But schools regarded the scores as a tool for ranking from the top to the bottom and made students compete with each other because the government will make sure that the schools acquiring good scores get extra attention.
Therefore, parents and students depend on private tutoring to survive this competition. Why does the government push ahead with this exam-oriented policy toward growing private learning?
To enhance public education, as the editorial said, the government ought to nurture with better rewards and a stricter appraisal system the cultivation of proficient teachers. The government only focuses on stricter appraisal by suppressing teachers' opinion, though.
A progressive teachers union states the educational policies that precipitate unlimited competition to enter elite schools strengthen the injustice of the standardized test. I don't understand why prosecutors punish them for the reason that they criticize about education heading in the wrong direction.
Korean parents are willing to sacrifice personal assets in order to ensure the best education for their children. Despite the economic downturn, the country's total private education costs increased.
Don't the President and his administration know the fact that their policies like increasing self-regulatory schools or administering the national assessment accelerate the increasing price of private education? And how dare they argue about the quality of public schools when they don't listen to teachers working there?
President Lee must ruminate about his educational point of view and his administration's policies before scolding education officials by just glancing over the statistics of private tutoring costs.
Jang Hye-won
Teacher
Sinnae-dong, Jungnang-gu, Seoul