'Autonomous' high schools

By Eugene Lee

Even if news were made public and commentaries weighed on the pros and cons of the closure of “autonomous” private high schools in South Korea, the saga of private education in the country is making yet another dramatic turn. The recent rulings made by several courts are delaying the decision made by the government and leaving the schools and most importantly the students in limbo.

Even though in recent years South Korea has drastically advanced to the leading group in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the OECD, the underlying conditions for the success of national education policy remain under a big question.

Among many other issues the autonomous private schools have come to symbolize a failure of a policy rather than a success. It seems that the policies undertaken under the President Lee Myung-bak have created the very comfortable means for the off-spring of well-off families to get safe entry into prestigious universities here.

Many analyses fail to see that these schools were established for various reasons and bear different histories to their creation. The lack of understanding of all the dynamics and complexity around the schools has made the government and the schools two polar opposites against each other.

The key argument, and perhaps the rightful one, is that the schools have failed to pass a performance test, which in some provinces included having a proportion of students from poorer backgrounds. In my view, it is an issue of an exclusive meritocracy that has been created inadvertently by government policies over several decades. The strife for a better national education system has created an educational ladder which allowed just a part of society to sustain a fusion between education and power (as well as economic influence) and ultimately propagated itself into a structure the elements of which we see in autonomous schools and top universities. “Tandems,” or schools affiliated with universities, such as Ewha Womans University or Hanyang University, are clear examples of it.

It is good that ultimately the schools and universities have figured out efficient ways to support themselves and reward capable students, but the problem is that this educational structure has become an exclusive one. It isn't a true meritocracy anymore, where you'd be rewarded based on your talent and achievement, but rather one that provides the conditions that allow you to reach the top.

Don't get me wrong, private education is good in many ways. At the end of the day, it is a part of the economy that contributes to the overall economic health of a nation. The major issue arises when private education begins to dominate and lead national education, it breeds inequity and inequality. The system has become exclusive. It will exclude you, because in order to succeed your talents and abilities may not be enough ― to succeed you must live in certain areas, go to certain schools, know certain people, and then and only then is entry into a top university is guaranteed. As our recently published research has shown, education policy has created conditions for a phenomenon of “pig mum” to exist and thrive.

A pig mum is “a Korean parent who is fully involved in organizing, scheduling and managing the educational process from primary to secondary school for a group of children in a neighborhood.” For better, or rather worse, these types of phenomena are aplenty. The only way to deal with them is to completely rethink and reorganize the idea and structure of meritocracy in the educational system in South Korea.

In my view, the cancelation of licenses was a good step, however with the improvement of the overall system in the long term those schools must be revived in the future. The Ministry of Education needs to get better in what it is supposed to do, that is, design a world-class educational system in Korea from kindergarten to postgraduate level. It has to gain a better understanding of its policies and become more specialist and professional at its job. The foundation has already been laid and the roots are there as well. A better governance for its future evolution would be my answer.

Eugene Lee (

mreulee@gmail.com

) is an adjunct professor of international studies at the Graduate School of Governance at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul.