Korean Job Discussion Forums

[NightSky]

[Privateer]

If you're an adult and you don't have a good grasp of the basics of world geography and history you're uneducated, end of story. No matter where you're from.

You might be forgiven not knowing the details of regions remote from your country but you should have a good general idea, and better than just a general idea for your own part of the world at least.

[Privateer]

[ESL Milk "Everyday]

NightSky,

I'm definitely not defending Korean society... believe me, it's not something I would wish upon anyone. There is no way I would ever want to marry into this society, and that goes double for raising children here. In fact, there's a lot about this culture that I truly deeply despise... and in many ways, living here has reaffirmed my affinity for my own culture... imperfect as it is.

On the other hand, my experience here has been very much from the outside looking in, and I'm willing to acknowledge that there is probably a great deal of it that totally escapes me... and it is quite possible that there are aspects of it that could, according to some odd form of logic, be regarded as more important than a bunch of names on a map.

I have to admit that I can't for the life of me figure out what, besides brainwashing, could make my students insist that their culture is more important than anything else... except the fact that it's well-defined and it belongs to them. Just because the Japanese borrowed a lot of it, put their own spin on it, and sold it to the west as their own, doesn't mean it stopped being Korean in the meantime. A lot of what seems like stale leftovers to us is something that they've had for what is apparently thousands of years. Apparently Korean culture pre-dates Western civilization, pre-dates China, pre-dates Japan... etc.

It's definitely unrealistic to think you can pull up a few headlines or cite some statistics and then assume you're fit to make definite conclusions about Korean culture. If you did the same for Americans, you'd probably come to some really grim conclusions as well... but I've been there a few times and I really don't think America is all that bad. But its roots definitely don't run as deep...

[TheUrbanMyth]

[Koveras]

A lot of you have exalted ideas about public education. In reality it's just socialization and training: here they're training the new generation to be just as ethnocentric as the old one!

[ducati]

[Enrico Palazzo]

[Cheonmunka]

I don't see where you get ideas that schools are training camps for ethnocentricity. My son and daughter both attend school, they learn good stuff about Korea, but not that it's the be all and end all.
My daughter says that the kids were talked to about trash, about the importance of keeping the place clean and not throwing trash around - that ought to please you.
What someone said back there about the kids learning from the small scale - the local area with maps etc in 사회 classes is quite right. The first ventures into (social geography - grade three) is looking at their local community.

BTW: In my final year of geography at uni. (NZ) our class was requested to state the names of some of the islands and regions in the Pacific. I was surrounded by A/B grade students yet I was the only one who put the hand up for Guam, for Melanesia, too. I think the lecturer was a bit exasperated. Yet, wasn't I aware of Guam because I had flown over it just months before?
When I was eleven I was lucky enough to fly around the World. Before that I didn't know where places were globally, certainly not in any relative meaningful way as is your unfair expectation on fourth grade nine year olds. I know it exasperates you. I hear you, but I don't think they can know that.
As someone said before, maybe Adventurer, in the wealthier neighborhoods you'll get kids knowing where international cities are - simply because they will have been there or been exposed to the maps while flying on the planes etc.

[The Gipkik]

Geography is just about memorization. Anybody can memorize stuff if they WANT to or NEED to. We are all just travelers here, so we are particularly conscious of the world, capital cities, and so on. It is irrelevant.

What the ignorance of children here thread should be stressing is maturity levels. It astounds me how immature and poorly behaved the kids are here. Grade 6 students punching and slapping each other silly, boys and girls. I swear they are grade 2 students with bigger feet. Real education doesn't begin here until middle school, when the testing starts getting serious. Until then it is the job of public schools to socialize students into proper little Koreans, give them the bare fundamentals and for hogwans to feed them the important information.

[cruisemonkey]

I bought a giant (metre diameter), blow-up globe I use a couple of times each term. It's so much better than struggling to explain the distortion on a 2-D mercator projection to middle school students.

[ducati]

[E_athlete]

sarah palin, that is all.

[ducati]

[rollo]

The OP seems to be having a bout of culture shock. thinking that all educational systems emphasize the same things or teach at the same pace. As for the U.s. considering that about a third of the population wasnt born in the u.s. that slightly skews the score. Also since there are more cities , towns etc. in the U.s. than say Sweden U.s. students have more domestic geograph place names place to learn.
the Korean education system is lacking in many ways but Korea has only been a first world country for a little over a decade. In some ways it is still third world.

The Op is probably a good teacher and really cares about the students, just a little burned out and sensitive to the flaws in the Korean system.