15% of Students Go Overseas for Educational Tour
By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
A growing number of high school students in Seoul go on overseas tours for educational purposes. According to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, students at 45 out of 292 high schools will take field trips abroad this year. The figure represents a 15-fold rise over the last four years.
Most of the schools choose China or Japan as the prime destination. The trip usually costs around 500,000 won for five days and four nights. Beijing and Tianjin are also popular sightseeing places for Chinese destinations and Osaka, Kyoto and Kyushu for Japanese excursions. Some schools will also visit Southeast Asian countries.
As a result, the cost of a field trip per high school student averaged 236,830 won last year, about 55,000 won more than the previous year. Also, some schools operate programs by differentiating students whose parents can afford to pay for overseas trip and cannot. For example, a girls’ high school in Seoul offers three destinations; Jeju Island for 214,000 won, Kyushu in Japan for 400,000 won and Beijing in China for 610,000 won.
In accordance with this trend, traditional sites for educational trips have seen a decrease in the number of tourists. For example, Hyeonchungsa Shrine where students take 70 percent of their tours has seen a drop in the number of tourists by about 400,000 since 2001.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) plan to boost domestic tourism by developing new tourist attractions in cooperation with provincial organizations to stop the outflow of students tourists.
Under the revised plan, they will invite about 150 primarily and secondary school teachers, who are in charge of education trips, to tourist places across the country in July and October.
According to a KTO survey of about 1,000 school teachers across the nation, 24 percent of them think teachers are needed who specialize in field trips and 20 percent of them answered that educational trips need to be more diverse.