Jung Min-ho has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2012, mostly covering social and political issues. He currently belongs to the Politics & City Desk where he covers topics such as health, labor and human rights. Prior to joining the team, he was responsible for covering North Korea and sports. His article about a biosecurity breach of Middle East respiratory syndrome won him an award from the Korea Science Journalists Association in 2016. He is also the co-author of the book, "Medical Pioneers of Korea" (2019). He served as the head of the international relations committee at the Journalists Association of Korea from 2021 to 2023.
INTERVIEW Activist calls for school police as alternative to ‘Teach You a Lesson’ agents
Kim Moo-yul plays Na Hwa-jin, an inspector from the fictional Educational Rights Protection Bureau, in a scene from the Netflix series "Teach You a Lesson." Courtesy of Netflix
By Jung Min-ho
Stationing officers is most practical answer to rising school violence, Lee Keon-joo says
Lee Keon-joo
An education activist is calling for the introduction of a U.S.-style school police system in Korea, arguing that a recent proposal to create a real-life version of a fictional teacher protection squad from the Netflix series "Teach You a Lesson" is legally infeasible and that only police officers with investigative powers can realistically safeguard teachers and students.
Lee Keon-joo, representative of the Citizens' Coalition for the Future of School Education, a Seoul-based nonegovernmental organization, said the proposal by Gyeonggi education superintendent-elect Ahn Min-seok — inspired by the Korean Educational Rights Protection Bureau, a fictional squad in the drama that deploys discipline agents, sometimes through vigilante violence, to rescue classrooms from unruly students and difficult parents — fails to address the legal realities teachers face daily.
“What’s depicted in the drama is a kind of fantasy, because in reality teachers would face serious legal consequences for human rights violations or child abuse if they did the same,” Lee said during a recent interview with The Korea Times. “But I’m glad the Netflix show and Ahn’s remarks have at least helped bring the issue into the public debate.”
He argued that police officers stationed in schools — physically present in hallways and common areas during breaks and lunchtime, when most bullying and violence occurs — would carry the legal authority to use physical restraint and investigative powers that teachers and administrative staff do not have, intervening in ways that would expose educators or students to legal risk if they attempted the same.
Lee, who briefly ran in the Seoul education superintendent race for June 3 local elections before withdrawing, said a school police system was one of his flagship pledges for strengthening teachers’ rights amid growing concerns over classroom violence and the limits of legal protections for them. He said stationing police officers in schools would do more for classroom safety than adding new layers of administrative staff without the authority to intervene in criminal cases.
Corporal punishment was fully banned in Korean schools in 2011 as part of efforts to protect students from violence by teachers. A series of new ordinances and laws have since further strengthened student rights. But Lee argued that these changes, while necessary at the time, no longer reflect today’s classroom realities.
As dramatized in “Teach You a Lesson,” today’s school violence, fraud and youth crime have become far more sophisticated, organized and calculated than in the past, according to Lee.
“Roughly 80 percent of teachers are now women,” he said. “If a serious fight breaks out, for example, someone has to step in and pull students apart — but with what strength and at what legal risk? In schools where violence has taken on gang-like characteristics, especially in the form of organized bullying, it is unrealistic to expect teachers to contain or stop it on their own.”
Lee stressed that Korea already operates something akin to school security, but in a limited, low-cost form.
“In schools, we have so-called school security guards … In a sense, they’re our existing school police. The problem is that they are almost all retirees — retired teachers or retired police officers — hired on a nonregular basis with low pay. They mostly stand at the school gate, checking who comes in and out,” he said.
Korea also operates a school liaison officer system, which effectively assigns a single police officer to cover 10 to 15 schools from a precinct. But Lee said this arrangement is far from sufficient, calling it largely nominal compared with having a dedicated police officer present at each school.
Ideally, Korea should introduce a full-fledged school police system, but if this proves difficult in the short term, “the education offices should at least hire existing security staff as regular workers and give them more responsibilities that go beyond simply guarding the school gate, so they can play a real role in preventing and responding to violence,” Lee said.
“The current debate offers an opportunity to make schools safer for everyone. We shouldn’t waste it.”