Education ministry sits on fence over coporal punishment

By Kang Shin-who

Staff reporter

The education ministry remains ambivalent about disputes over corporal punishment at schools, adding confusion to the sensitive issue.

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, headed by liberal superintendent Kwak No-hyun, has made it clear that it will ban physical discipline and establish a task force to come up with a detailed action plan. The team, comprising of 20 teachers, parents and students, will devise specific guidelines on how to eliminate physical punishment at schools.

However, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology is sitting on the fence. It has not disclosed any official position in response to the recent incident. Ministry officials are just saying that the Seoul education office’s move to ban physical punishment is a breach of the current Education Law which allows corporate punishment on condition that it is “necessary for educational purposes.”

The ban also conflicts with the law as it guarantees the autonomy of school principals and teachers in managing students, according to ministry officials.

The National Human Rights Commission of Korea said Friday that the ministry has been sitting for eight years on its proposal that it should revise the education law as corporal punishment violates the human rights of students.

“We recommended that the education ministry revise the law in September 2002. In July, 2008, we also reiterated that schools educate students without using whips,” a human rights agency official said.

The Korean Teachers & Education Workers’ Union also called for the government to come up with measures. “Disputes over corporate punishment are becoming a war of attrition. Government-level steps should be prepared,” it said in a statement.

The Korean Federation of Teacher’s Association, the nation’s largest conservative teachers’ group, is opposing the ban on corporal punishment, claiming the ban will weaken teachers’ authority to curb unethical and problematic students.

Many foreign teachers here said they are “very uncomfortable” with corporal punishment.

Gregory C.F. Dolezal, president of Association for Teachers of English in Korea (ATEK) said, “ATEK has heard from many of its members that they feel uncomfortable and helpless when they see a child being hit with a stick or publicly humiliated which can be psychologically abusive. Both Korean and native instructors indicate that there is no way to report such behavior without risking their career or that of another.”

Dolezal, also an English instructor at Tongmyung University, Busan, said that in the case of public schools, there is both a legal and contractual requirement to have two teachers in the classroom at all times. “This system not only improves the quality of education but also makes it much less likely that children can be abused,” he said.

Gavin Farrell, a Canadian English teacher, also said that schools should not use any type of corporal punishment. “Of course, it’s terrible, so backward unlike the rest of the progress evident in Korea,” Farrell said.

Dolezal said that ATEK members are willing to discuss ways to prevent students being abused inside classrooms.

“Currently there is no system in place to accurately identify and report abuse such as corporal punishment or sexual abuse. All teachers and administrators should be trained properly and have a basic understanding of the law, which is not the case at present,” he said. “We would be very keen to connect with related ministries to share the burden of carrying out this important effort.”