Student Athletes Told to Study Harder
By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
Student athletes have long been excused from classes and neglecting their studies.
Colleges have enrolled athletic students regardless of their academic scores, as long as they are outstanding in their sporting field.
The education authorities are now trying to change this policy to require young athletes to study as well.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said Monday school sports teams will have to produce players who achieve a certain grade.
The ministry is also telling universities to place more importance on academic records and "volunteer" activities when they select athletes for their sports teams.
The ministry already has mandated participation in all classes and discouraged schools from holding sports competitions during the regular semesters. Previously, students could get away with attending 70 percent of their classes.
It has also set up a minimum academic level for them so student athletes must achieve academically as well as athletically, if they want to go to college.
The "Sports Science Program" will be introduced to nurture students who are also athletes.
Under the plan, the ministry has divided the country into four regions and selected three schools for each. The selected schools will run the program on a pilot basis until 2012 so they will be able to invite coaches, counselors and analysts to create a better program that can be used by a greater number of schools.
The ministry will also work together with the Korean Council for University Education, an association of college presidents, in order to give benefits to student athletes who also excel in academic fields. The ministry's latest measures also come at a time when school sports are often associated with the violent ways that coaches discipline student athletes.
In one such case, a member of an elementary school's "ssireum," or Korean wrestling, team was so repeatedly beaten by his coach that he had to have a skin graft on his buttocks.