Waste of Tome and Money

By Kim See-bong

According to recent statistics, the number of Korean primary and secondary school students studying in the United States has reached 100,000.

Today the United States is not the only country that Korean parents send their children to. Depending on their economic capacity they usually also choose between Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Philippines, India and Fiji are the third, fourth and fifth choices. They all say it is ``to help my kid study English.''

Setting aside the reasonableness of this social phenomenon, what I intend to ask now is how large the actual number of kids studying abroad will be, perhaps even more than 1 million. With the Chinese boom, the number will be beyond our estimation.

Needless to say, we can never overestimate the importance of foreign languages at this time of globalization. Especially English, which is a must to keep up with the times. Also indispensable is the Chinese and French language, for the future and the upcoming market of Africa, respectively. However, what matters most is the current sudden boom of sending children abroad.

With the help of my 15-year experience as an overseas study agent, I have analyzed the trends of studying abroad into categories and reached a conclusion as follows:

Category 1.

Seven out of ten students belong to this group. They go abroad because they can't keep up with the system in Korea and the reason is commonly attributed to our bad educational system. The parents think their children have potential, but the system is holding them back so in search of something better, they send their children abroad.

Most frequently, they blame the problems their children have on our educational system. Of course, I agree that there are problems with our educational system. But what I want to point out is that their parents are dreaming of something impossible. If they aren't getting the grades in their country, why should they get better grades in a foreign country?

Category 2.

Two out of ten go because others go. The principal reason is attributed to parents' exhausting craze for their children's education. Parents send them abroad as a last resort in desperation because others do so, wishing that their kids could be good at English at least. What nonsense! Education is not to be determined by a mob psychology.

Category 3.

One out of ten are those who are really want a better educational system. They can never be satisfied with what our current education offers because they are far superior to others in academic achievement. They have to go out, no doubt, for better opportunity.

Here is a big misunderstanding that parents have about language. They overlook the simple fact that there are so many Korean students who are poor at Korean, though they were born in Korea and have grown up speaking Korean. They say in the entrance exam the most difficult subject is Korean.

Nevertheless, if they still insist on going out to learn basic conversational English, they don't have to spend a lot of money, because they can make it in Korea. English should be regarded as just one of the many subjects they have to study. If on-the-spot experience is indispensably required, they can get it more safely at a more advanced age. Academic motivation should be spurred on by self-motivation.

Therefore, parents should be mindful of how a child could do well in a country in which everything is strange and different and whose language they can't understand. On the face of it, though with the passage of time their ears will become open to the language, they should consider the loss they have to suffer at the most important and emotionally unstable period of their life?

To think of Korea in fifty years with the current ongoing trend of education, our country will be inundated with returning students who have some knowledge of English or Chinese. Realistically, only a small number of them can get a good job in the United States, China, or even in Europe.

The principal reason is that in most cases students who fall behind others in their own country with their own language can hardly grow up to become competitive. The most common kind of job they can achieve is as a tourist guide. To make the matters worse, immigration problems are insurmountable.

Our society should prepare for this group before it's too late, if the current trend cannot be curbed. The problem is, to my regret that they cannot, in most cases, come back to their country as good intellectuals as our future society requires. They will be qualified neither at home nor abroad. The English knowledge they got at the expense of the golden period of their life will turn into a curse rather than a blessing and they will become problems in our society.

So I dare to predict that they will turn into social wastes or pollutants, which will contaminate our society and we shall have to find somewhere to dump them. Otherwise, the calamity our society will suffer would be greater than the disaster the earth is going through currently because of pollution.

Consequently, to the government and to our overzealous parents alike I would like to say, ``Take it easy. Watch out for the dark clouds on the horizon and do something to prevent them before it is too late."

The writer is the principal of Polyglot Day School in Bundang, Gyeonggi Province.