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| Song In-soo of World Without Worries about Shadow Education / Courtesy of Ashoka Korea |
By Kim Bo-eun
Private education is a deep-rooted issue in Korean society. With a degree from Seoul's top universities a much-needed ticket to land a decent job, competition to get into top schools is sky high. Parents therefore rely on education outside school to get their children ahead of their peers. Public education has lost its role, and parents have been burdened with costs, while children slave away at hagwons late into the night.
World Without Worries about Shadow Education
The issue of private education, with its roots so deep and the phenomenon so prevalent, had been regarded as something impossible to tackle. Discussions on the issue mainly involved education experts and policy makers. Parents, regarded as the victims as well as the perpetrators of the private education craze, were left out.
But Song In-soo, a former high school teacher and education activist, developed an idea to create a grassroots movement to tackle the issue, with parents the main agent. In 2008, he founded the civic group World Without Worries about Shadow Education, where members could network and reinforce the idea that private education is not necessary. The first step is to have them realize the misconceptions of private education. Once their perceptions are corrected, they collectively take action to fix problematic policies.
Something worth noting is that the group does not have a political inclination, as most local civic groups for education do. Song says it aims to benefit young students of all social classes, from low-income groups to children from wealthy families in Gangnam.
World Without Worries about Shadow Education, which now has about 3,700 members, has been lobbying policy makers to abolish what it says is the unnecessary and harmful practice of private education.
Last year, it had a law regulating prerequisite education passed by the National Assembly. The law bans schools from teaching coursework of higher grades. Song is also working on bringing private hagwons into the realm of regulation.
In 2009, it also played a role in bringing down the level of the entrance examination for prestigious high schools specializing in foreign languages or science so students who do not receive private education outside school get a shot at being accepted. This ended up saving some 2 trillion won in spending on private education.
But it was not an easy road. Song had always felt like some sort of pariah. But he has finally received some recognition. He was recently selected as a fellow of Ashoka, an organization based in the U.S. that identifies and invests in social entrepreneurs.
"It's like my work and the way I've been conducting it has been validated," he said in a recent interview.
The group's aim is to bring private education costs to zero by 2022 and create a world where no student commits suicide from academic stress.
But the movement is not just about reducing education outside school. It goes beyond the practical level of saving parents money. It is about shifting the focus of education on grades to character building. The activist group wants children to be independent, considerate and able to solve problems through the knowledge they acquire.
It says Korean children often become overly dependent on their parents who try to control every aspect of their lives. Children also are deprived of the opportunity to foster their ability to design their free time and spend it productively, as anxious parents put them in hagwons in their spare time.
In addition, in the ultra-competitive society, children are taught to scramble to be first in line, even if it means trampling on others. Consideration for others is hardly instilled in growing children.
Lastly, Korean children mostly learn from memorizing textbooks, instead of trying to understand the content. They have difficulty in problem solving because they aren't trained to develop thinking skills.
The civic group aims for member parents to meet and discuss how to cultivate good qualities in their children. It also provides videos on the subject.
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| Middle school students walk down a street in a hagwon district in No-won-gu, northeastern Seoul, in this file photo. A recent report shows Korean students' academic stress levels exceed the average of 29 wealthy countries surveyed by UNICEF. / Korea Times file |
Song as a parent
Refusing private education for your child when every other student in his or her class is receiving it is a daunting decision. "Because there is a group of parents with the same belief, it enables them to make the decision and stick to it," Song says.
This frees them from fear and anxiety, and therefore helps them become more understanding toward their children, enabling their relationships to improve, which is something Song has experienced as a parent.
As a high school teacher for 13 years before he became involved in civic work, Song was highly concerned about his children's grades, like any other parent.
When his older son was in middle school, Song asked him about his test score, to which his son replied he had not graded his test. "Having been a teacher for more than a decade, I could tell that my son didn't want to show me his score, because it was obviously poor," Song recalled.
It was then he made the decision to detach himself from his children's academic achievements. "I haven't asked about his grades since." But Song says it is "continuous inner struggle" to resist.
Song says he leaves his children to spend their free time as they want, but also tries to spend as much time as he can with them. He keeps a journal with each of his sons, and it goes back and forth as Song asks about what his sons have written about. He says this helps stimulate their thoughts and builds thinking skills. He also plays table tennis with them when he can.
Song's older son had done a good deal of meandering before he started studying as a senior in high school. Song says he has achieved tremendous academic progress in the past year, and that that is why he decided to study another year to see how much more he could improve before taking the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) again.
But Song says he is not pressuring his son to get a good score on the test, which for most Koreans is an exam that has life-or-death implications.
"I tell my son that it is OK for him to go to a university in a provincial area, because I am going to change Korea so that graduates from those schools are also acknowledged."
