Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Juregen]

[ThingsComeAround]

I really like what Unposter had to say.

That being said, English education funding is often misappropriated or mismanaged. Hagwons in particular have failed to offer quality due to greed. The author of the article doesn't like private lessons however they do in fact work the best. That puts the ultimate power in the hands of the parents, who can replace the teacher at any time if they are not effective. I do agree that English Ed spending could be done with a fraction of what is spent on it now.

[liveinkorea316]

I agree with the Pamphlets the civic group are giving out. Koreans spend far too much on hagwons. They are out of step with the rest of the world.

There is no reason to say that English hagwons should be all stopped but just that the most inefficient and bad value ones should go. The only ones left should be helping students who really do need to improve their English. Also new technologies should take up alot of the slack by costing much less - online study is one area that needs to take off. Also digital classrooms.

[goreality]

The WWWPE seems interested in helping Korean families with real, quantifiable issues like money. They use clear arguments based on valid research, facts, and creditable statistics. I can support their efforts.
AES is concerned with the perceived social risks of foreign English teachers. Their arguments are based on opinions, haphazard cases and statistical fallacies. I cannot support their efforts.

[ZIFA]

[skeeterses]

Here's my 2 cents.

I say that compulsory foreign language education never works on a large scale. Never did, and never will. The Koreans should have learned that lesson from the Japanese occupation prior to WW2. They didn't.

Luckily, Korean school kids don't have foreign soldiers beating a foreign language into them nowadays. Nonetheless, throwing so much money into having Korean kids learn English has had the effect of attracting a lot of unqualified hagwon owners and unqualified native speakers to the education profession.

Having every kid get fluent in English is a pipe dream that Korea should give up on. Instead, they should focus their ESL money on the students who are studying fields that require English such as International Business and Medicine. If English is required for every Korean kid, what will end up happening is that most of those kids will be competing for a limited number of Corporate jobs when they grow up.

[Malislamusrex]

Well if his wife who has a degree in early childhood studies says it's true it has to be right, let's ignore academic research.

[Malislamusrex]

1. foreign language works on a large scale, almost every country in the world learns a second language, Latin was taught as an academic subject in the UK until 100 years ago because learning 2 languages has advantages.

2. Your second point about 'foreigners' being unqualified and being expensive is political.

3. Yes all Korean students wont be fluent, that is fairly obvious, but saying studying English as an academic subject is not worth while is ridiculous. Some will do better than others and it will help the Korean economy and the Korean people in general if students improve their English. Saying English is not important because everyone wont be fluent is like saying let's stop funding for Math because all students are not going to professors of pure mathematics

This groups argument is.... we have invested x amount in English education we want our kid to have a good job, and they are angry that they are not seeing results, maybe if they see their child as a person and not an investment the child would do better in school.

[skeeterses]

[Malislamusrex]

My third point was a general point about the folks who say Koreans should stop learning English because it is too expensive.

I agree the qualifications to teach English is not all that high, but the argument that native teacher can't teach English does't really hold up because native speakers have implicit knowledge they can't express explicitly. Saying a native teacher can't teach his first language is political.

I accept your point about Hakwons, but they would not exist if there wasn't a demand for them. They must be doing something right, but sometimes I think that it's not quality but quantity that matters, if you send your kid to a hakwon for 20 hours a week he is bound to learn something.

[peter07]

This reminds me of something I saw in season 5 of "Hell's Kitchen." A female contestant admitted to having no formal training in cooking despite charging students $300 per three to four hours of instruction. She then struggled in the kitchen, prompting Gordon Ramsay to call her a thief for charging people that kind of money despite being an awful cook. She somehow survived a few weeks before finally getting the axe.

Ramsay summed it best: hope her teaching biz goes well because she sure as hell can't cook.

[fermentation]

The problem is that Korean parents cram their kids's little heads with daily piano lessons, English lessons, Math, swimming, tennis, science, etc. They go to a special art school to get better grades in art, then they go to a private music teacher to get better grades in music. These kids get very little sleep and even less of a life. Something is wrong here and it isn't just hagwons. How can their brains retain English lessons when they're constantly bombarded with "education?"

[brickabrack]

Well said, Ferm.

I don't get no sleep!!!

None of these kids are going to be
Picassos or Valentino Liberaces.
Hedging your bets with englishee is a much
better pay off than most of the other hagwon
scams that these people pay for.
A well-rounded ed is better than too
much focus, but it doesn't really apply
to the K environment so much.

IMHO

[Stout]

Reminds me of a TESOL conference I attended in Seoul.

The finale for the day had a bunch of TESOL Ph D'd "experts" up on the stage (some of whom have never taught in Korea), most or all of them from some big program in Anaheim which has managed to convince major Korean unis to go their way.

So in any case a Donald Rumsfeld-esque expert starts bellowing out a chant that the Korean government must acquiesce and begin compulsory English ed at an earlier age, all the while emphasizing how much more money it would translate into for all of us (the anointed foreign EFL saviors), at which point the room erupted into some surreal type of mass hysteria with everyone cheering madly as though everyone had dropped a tab or two.

Then someone asked him what one should do with public school Korean students who are unruly in the classroom, and he didn't have much of an answer.

[asylum seeker]

Wow, paranoid much OP?