By Park Hee-jae
It is about seven in the evening, and the sound of a chalk tapping on a blackboard seems louder than ever in a classroom with only eight students. A math teacher writes some sophisticated equations on the board.
These are things that the students should be learning in next year’s math course. Such sights have only become more common recently, after President Lee Myung-bak’s government started to promote afterschool courses that would hopefully reduce private education expenses in this country and provide students with a quality education.
As a high school student in Gangnam, I have actually experienced some notable changes because of President Lee’s policies for the past couple of years. Of them all, I believe that there are two most significant ones. One is introduction of the “admissions officer system” that colleges now use to admit students based on extracurricular activities that high schools now offer, and the other is expansion of extra school activities in middle schools and high schools.
In the end, these two major policies aim to encourage every individual’s different talents and elevate their potential rather than simply demanding them to receive better grades. While no one seems to deny that Korea has longed for such educational reform for a long time, and now is the right time for it, many students are not satisfied, and others are confused with the way the changes have taken place.
For instance, when I first signed up for a new afterschool English class with my friends last year, I was excited to be able to learn advanced English materials in my own school for only 100,000 won a month. However, since there were only two levels available ― an intermediate and advanced, the English ability gap between a student with the highest and the lowest English level was huge. Obviously, the teacher had difficulties giving a lecture to all the different levels of students. What I started seeing in just a few weeks were about half the seats empty, and an unmotivated teacher barely even managing to carry on the course.
The biggest problem with afterschool courses is that students simply don’t prefer it over hagwon or private institutes. Only a limited variety of classes in public schools are offered because there is a lack of teachers. Most of the students would rather pay extra money and travel extra distances to learn at hagwon. One thing that makes students trust hagwon more than after-school courses is the feedback system.
In private institutes, teachers try to give the best lecture possible because any flaw in their lecture can directly result in complaints from parents and students. Sometimes they can even lose their job. Some hagwon even have a rating system; students rate their teachers every month and write their opinions about the teachers in a survey form. Meanwhile, afterschool courses have no such feedback system yet. Another serious problem is that students sign up for afterschool courses such as math class, Korean literature class, and even sports club just to add a line on their student record. Ever since universities started to adopt the “admission officer system,” students are desperate to make a fancy “resume” to prove how actively they participated in extra school courses, and to look attractive to universities.
Yet, afterschool courses have some potential to revolutionize Korea’s outdated education system rather positively. First, Korean public schools have the best qualified teachers. Nearly all of them have majored in the subject, or pedagogy of the subject they teach.
Moreover, it is extremely difficult to pass the entrance test to become a teacher in Korea, so it means that as soon as the system get settled, they are ready to provide high-quality education to students. Second, schools have “teacher exchanging system,” in which several near-by schools exchange their best teachers with one another when requested, or when a new course is established. This could be the key to overcoming low participation rates of afterschool courses since students always expect to hear something different than regular school lectures when they sign up for the courses.
Park Hee-jae is 2nd grade student at Chungdam High School in Seoul.