It's public education, stupid!

By Park Moo-jong

Korean words familiar to foreigners could be kimchi and bibimbap, rather like Italian spaghetti and Japanese sushi. "Palli palli" or quickly may be included especially for East Asian people encountering quick-tempered Korean tourists.

In addition, two words about private education are increasingly becoming familiar to foreign parents these days, thanks to Korean mothers' unrivaled craze for education for their kids.

The two are "gwawoe" or out-of-school private tutoring, and "hagwon" or private teaching institutes.

The decades-long private education fever has been propelled by mothers who are desperate to send their kids to prestigious universities, dubbed "SKY" (Seoul, Korea, Yonsei), or at least those located in Seoul.

Here comes the latest joke. What are the three success factors for Korean children today? It is not, ironically, their ability and physical strength. The answer is the economic power of grandpa, mother's information capability and their father's moderate indifference. Of course, it is needless to say the children's (academic) ability and physical strength must be counted first.

It is not an old story anymore that South Korea's private education after school has become a major concern and topic around the world.

One of the most crucial and obligatory pledges of presidential candidates, either from the ruling or opposition parties, for the May 9 by-election, is how to tackle the issue of private education in terms of the ever-snowballing financial burden.

Recent government statistics show last year's spending on private education for students at elementary, middle and high schools hit an all-time high of 18.1 trillion won (($16 billion), compared to 386.7 trillion won ($331 billion) of the national budget.

Per student, the monthly "gwawoe" lessons cost 256,000 won ($225). But this is an average amount. Depending on the parents' income, it differs greatly with the highest expense easily hitting 1 million won ($900) easily.
Thirty-seven years ago back in 1980, the then "heavy-handed" government of general-turned-President Chun Doo-hwan banned private tutoring to "free parents from the financial burden of spending more than 30 percent of their living expenses on after school lessons."

But the next government of Roh Tae-woo, Chun's Korea Military Academy classmate, loosened this in 1989, allowing university students to become "gwawoe" tutors in a policy to "calm the flourishing student movement," possibly to quell their anti-government struggle.

Then, in May 2000, 20 years later, the Constitutional Court that accepted the parliamentary impeachment of President Park Geun-hye last month, overturned the ban, ruling it unconstitutional because it infringed upon the basic rights of the people, including the right to educate their children.

At that time, people, especially in the low income brackets, criticized the court, complaining that the legalization of gwawoe would widen the gap between the haves and have-nots.

They claimed that the lifting of the ban was a license for the rich to hoard money for "qualified" private tutors to teach their children who would then have a better chance and support to enter good universities.

They claimed those who could not afford the exorbitant fees would be denied equal opportunity in education and thus a chance to climb the social ladder.

Still now, the situation is similar. But the ever-increasing cost has been responsible partly for one of the most serious national tasks to be dealt with: The lowest birthrate among the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries.

How to solve the deep-rooted problem is rather easy. "It's public education, stupid." The government, schools and parents know the answer.

Public education is on the verge of collapse, with entering a prestigious university being the foremost goal of students and their parents, irrespective of the former's ability and the latter's financial support.

In particular, the chronic feud between the left and right in the education sector is to blame for poor education at public schools.

Teachers have already lost authority to control students during classes. Many of them do not even wake up sleeping students because they "do not make a noise" during classes.

And the reality is that many superintendents of the Office of Education elected by a direct vote of the people appear to be more concerned about their election than how to teach students at school.

The aggressive left-wing "Jeon Gyojo" or the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU), which was judged "illegal" by a court, is still yielding a mighty influence on the administration of public schools.

What is urgent to put the staggering public education on the right path is to encourage school teachers and to provide programs to upgrade their quality, the two key issues for quality teaching at school.

It is nonsense for three-year-old kids to go to English, piano or taekwondo hagwon "to have competitive power" as their mothers "believe."

And the government, which has changed the university entrance examination formula "numerously," so far, should take its hands off its administration. Each university should be given a free hand to recruit students on their own.

Park Moo-jong is the Korea Times advisor. He served as the president-publisher of the nation's first English newspaper founded in 1950 from 2004 to 2014 after working as a reporter of the daily since 1974. He can be reached at moojong@ktimes.com or emjei29@gmail.com