This is one of those evenings that one thing lead to another and then to another. I am not always sure what to make of the info... but its wasted if not shared so here goes. I was looking into the footnotes of the Benchmarked for Success... report. (located in the files tab but here is the link) corestandards.org/assets/0812BENCHMARKING.pdf I noticed a reference to a document from The World Bank titled Korea as a Knowledge Economy: Evolutionary Process and Lessons Learned from 2006. I referred back to the comment that was noted. According to The World Bank, the contribution of knowledge... was a key factor in Koreas miracle of rapid economic growth. Couple things crossed my mind. First, of course, here we go again with the economic talk. I am so sick of this idea that the purpose of education is to train a child for a job. It is the same idea they have been pushing for 100 years. The generations before us have fought it. Why? Because we do not want a forced economy. We do not want a form of socialism. I am all for helping educate a child about options for their future... but that isnt what they want. I wanted to see the full content, so I started searching. Here it is usp.ac.fj/worldbank2009/frame/Documents/Publications_regional/409300PAPER0KR101OFFICIAL0USE0ONLY1.pdf From the Foreword: The Republic of Korea has been experiencing rapid, and more importantly, sustained economic growth since the 1960s... the majority of this growth can be attributed to knowledge accumulation, rather than to the accumulation of traditional factors of production of capital and labor. Korea had achieved this knowledge-based growth by investing heavily in education and training, boosting innovation through intensive research and development, and developing a modern and accessible information infrastructure, all coupled with a stable economic and conducive institutional regime that enabled the knowledge-related investments to flourish... (my note: sounds kinda like what we have going on, huh?! but here is the kicker...) Its successful knowledge-based development experience offers many valuable lessons for developing economies... this new report on Korea is geared towards policy makers from developing countries that are in the midst of, or are intending to, embark on the transition towards the knowledge economy. WHOA, since when is the US a developing economy? We arent. So... why are we taking lessons from them? There is a table in the Benchmarking report on Koreas Education Advancement. It shows that in the last 45 years, Korea has passed the US in the percentage of citizens with secondary credential. It sounds to me like some people in the US are taking lessons from Korea. I have read the comparisons over and over again from multiple resources. So it makes me wonder... what is education like in Korea. I have looked into China and Finland, but never Korea. The Republic of Korea.. report came from South Korea. And since North Korea is... North Korea.. I assume it must be South Korea they are speaking of. Here is an article in Time Magazine (Seoul) content.time/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427,00.html On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them. In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the countrys addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators... I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. There was no place to hide, Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. I told them, Its the hagwon thats in violation, not you. You can go home.... One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable, President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008. But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success... In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapores Education Minister was asked last year about his nations reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: Were not as bad as the Koreans. In Seoul, legions of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. At the prestigious Daesung Institute, admission is based (diabolically enough) on students test scores. Only 14% of applicants are accepted. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nations top three universities... In the U.S., Barack Obama and his Education Secretary speak glowingly of the enthusiasm South Korean parents have for educating their children, and they lament how far U.S. students are falling behind... You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system, Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, but Koreans are not happy with it.... Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more American — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more Asian.... All we do is study, except when we sleep, one high school boy told me, and he was not exaggerating. The typical academic schedule begins at 8 a.m. and ends sometime from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the ambition of the student... It breaks my heart, another teenage boy tells me, to see my classmates compete against each other instead of helping each other.... IS THIS WHAT WE WANT FOR OUR STUDENTS? No. Are we going to subject our children to this lifestyle? NO! Then why continue to compare us to them???? The same thing was found about China and also Singapore. Yet those are three of the main countries I continue to see quoted as a model for us. It is just not going to happen. I followed the previous article to this one. newsfeed.time/2011/07/10/save-a-tree-teach-through-the-cloud-south-korea-schools-first-to-go-paperless/ By 2015, South Korea has vowed that their entire school system will be paperless....And although South Korea will be the first country to go paperless, the U.S. looks like it’s following close behind. Just further illustrates that US administration is taking lessons from education in South Korea. Apparently, students in South Korea have education fever. medindia.net/news/Intensely-Competitive-Education-In-South-Korea-Leads-to-Education-Fever-68190-1.htm#ixzz38RqD4nZh Like eight-year-old Ho You-Jin who, after a gruelling six hours of learning at her South Korean state elementary school, heads home -- not to rest but to study even further... Education fever takes a heavy social and economic toll, with the costly private cram schools blamed for driving poor households into debt and stressing out young children... In addition to hagwon, many families send their children to overseas schools or universities to give them a head start in the rat race. Mothers often accompany them. Fathers known as wild goose daddies commute by air from jobs in Korea to see their families overseas. NOW... As if that is not enough... There is this one. abc.net.au/news/2013-10-22/a-korean-education/5037704 The first part of that education took place on our bus trip from the airport, where our guide Christina (her name for inept English speakers who cannot get their tongues around her actual name) gave us an insight into everyday Korean life. Christina is the mother of a boy at a critical point in his schooling. You see, he is about to go into grade five (of elementary school) and will soon face important tests that will determine his success in life, or at least so is the attitude here.... We were told by three university professors that it is typical for Korean school students to spend an average of 14 hours a day studying... It is common for middle class families to spend around $800 per child per month on this private out-of-school tuition. It is no wonder then that most Koreans generally choose to have only one or two children... there is also little doubt here that all the pressure is literally killing Korea’s youth. The nation has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, a rate WHICH SPIKES AMONGST YOUNG PEOPLE WHEN EXAM RESULTS ARE RELEASED... However, everyone we have spoken to so far says Koreans feel trapped in their world leading education system – no one wants to be the first parent not to push their children and send them to Hagwon, only to watch their career aspirations be trampled by the students who push harder. (emphasis mine) Again, I learned the same thing about China and Singapore. Enough said... for tonight.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 03:26:54 +0000
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