Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Summer Wine]

I am positing the hypothosis that the make up of a technical high school has as much to do with the economic class of its students as it does with their intelligence level.

I have over the week discussed work and the jobs that my students fathers do and by and large the majority of them are either in a technical job such as electrician etc or in a service industry such as Laundry owner.

The lower levels are generally the sons of service workers or technical with the higher levels having a smattering of office workers as parents.

While I worked in the Hagwon industry, I generally found the majority of my students to be the children of professionals or business owners.

It appears to me that generally speaking the placement of students in a technical school has as much to do with thier parents economic levels and that if some of these students had been born into wealthier families they would have gone a lot further.

This is in complete opposite of my understanding of the technical school system before I arrived. Before I taught in this school, I believed that the technical schools had more to do with the inability of students to actually make the grade.

Though I feel the schools history teacher said it best when he said "academic high schools are for those who would like to go to college and technical schools are for those who dont".

I could go on in more detail into this, but I guess I just have a question for those who work in academic high schools and technical schools as to whether they have experienced similar findings.

Do you think that the make up of technical students and academic students has as much to do with their economical situation and do you think it would be in Koreas best interest to allow mature age students to enter the Colleges based on work experience and other factors?

[cruisemonkey]

It's a combination of the two.

I have a friend who taught for a year in a Technical HS and his favourite saying was -
"I'm not smart enough to make it dumb enough for them to understand."

[Yu_Bum_suk]

To a large extent it does. I do have some vocational students who are just plain not very bright and wouldn't make it regardless of their parents' income. However I also have a few who are more intelligent than many of my academic students. Either they fell behind becuase they lacked the quality and quantity of teaching that would have brought out the best in them or their parents think that a vocational programme is more practical and realistic.

[Summer Wine]