Korean Job Discussion Forums

[fidel]

It seems like newspapers these days let any old hack loose to write disparaging comments about Canadians!

[Captain Corea]

Where is the emote for "/she needs a swift kick in the butt"?

[babtangee]

Sounds like someone found out about all the other young ladies their Canadian tutor was privately "tutoring".

Heheheheh.

[BigBlackEquus]

She reads Dave's.

You guys would absolutely shnitz if you knew who one of her friends was.

[joe_doufu]

Sounds like a typical sophomore's paper... wow, so brilliant, identifying the problems that a million other people have already identified. Propose a solution? No? Oh well maybe next semester.

[Red]

[Bulsajo]

[Pangit]

[Demonicat]

If BBE is correct and she does read Dave's...

[Yu_Bum_suk]

More cases of idiot Koreans getting the education they deserve. Actually the rich ones are lucky to have access to illegal private tutors, some of whom are actually good teachers.

[BigBlackEquus]

She never told us if she had a private tutor.

[Ya-ta Boy]

I��d like to respond to some of the comments in the OP.

(Quote) ``English education in Korea is one big money-making racket,���� complained a foreign friend and so-called teacher.
``It��s such a terrible waste of money.���� (Quote)

It wouldn��t be too hard to locate five, a dozen, or even a hundred posts here at Dave��s that say essentially the same thing. Those stuck being the entertainment monkey or the babysitter at a kiddie hakwon say this kind of thing all the time. Most of us have complained about the business orientation of hakwons. However, the usual focus of the comments is that the hakwon owner is the greedy one. The old joke is, ��Why are they called ��hogwons��?�� ��Because the boss hogs all the wons.��

Are they ��a terrible waste of money��? Many of them are. They have no curriculum to speak of and are directed by people who know nothing about education and only care about education to the extent they can keep parents paying each month. And they hire untrained, inexperienced people under the openly held belief that ��anyone�� can teach.

Moving on to the writer��s numbered questions:

Question #1: The education reform of 1980. Here we run in to an aspect of Korea��s socialist ideals. In a society that is obsessed with ranking everything, it is weird to have this attitude pop up here. But there you are. Koreans want every kid to have equal access to a good education so he/she will have a shot at the best universities. I don��t think many of us fault them for this ideal. The government forces public school teachers to change jobs every few years to help insure the best teachers don��t become concentrated in the schools in the rich neighborhoods. I��m teaching in a public high school this year. Every single one of the Korean teachers commutes from Masan/Changwon or Daegu.

The part that surprises and frustrates most of us is the ban on private tutoring. None of us come from a country where socialism surfaces in just this way. It does seem odd that they forbid the rich from spending their money to educate their kids. We all know that the recent crack-down will reduce the number of foreigners doing private teaching, leaving it to the Koreans who do private teaching. From what I can understand, university students are allowed to teach privately. It is foreigners who are barred. Since this is where the real money is:��grrrrrrrrrrr.

(Quote)��What about the high number of foreigners who enter the country on tourist visas and then get employed to teach at a hagwon or as private teachers?�� (Quote)

Like many, I don��t really understand why people get so hyper about this. It seems to me that a simple solution would be to make it legal to go down to the local immi office and change a tourist visa to an E-2 without the expensive trip out of the country. I have always suspected that KAL is behind keeping this rule in place. If people are going to get upset, then the focus should be on the people who do the hiring and only secondarily on the people who take advantage of the job offer.

(Quote) ��Question 2: Who controls the so-called English academies?�� (Quote)

The answer to that one is easy. No one does. One poster mentioned that the market does. I think that is partly true. As far as I can tell, the government only cares how many square feet the building has before allowing someone to open a hakwon. I've never heard that the government asks the owner for a business plan or that they submit the cirriculum to any kind of education office review.

I for one, would welcome some regulations in the English education industry where publishers of materials were required to have qualified people writing and checking the books they publish. I��ve seen more than one friend cry over wasted money when I went through a W10,000 book and marked it up in red, fixing the dozens of mistakes on each page. In this case, the consumer is not in a position to influence the publisher. I agree with the writer. The government does have a role to play in protecting the consumer. Not just with publishers, but with the whole industry.

I��m going to assume that the writer meant to say that there are many teachers who are as qualified, as caring, and as dedicated who are not from North America.

(Quote) ��What can one foreigner teach your kid�� (Quote)
This has been debated many times here at Dave��s. What is the real reason we are here? The real reason is that the Koreans, for whatever reason, think their kids need to be exposed to us. Is it really useful for the kids to spend time with a foreigner rather than a Korean? That is questionable. It depends largely on the qualifications and ability of both the foreigner and the Korean teacher. In a world that doesn��t have to be ideal to achieve it, Korean universities could be turning out highly trained, highly motivated, highly qualified Korean teachers to teach Korean kids. That they don��t is no one��s fault but their own.

(Quote)��My call is for our government to revolutionize education. Standardization and control is perhaps an excellent point of departure. Protecting consumers is non-negotiable. Influencing the future through control over an issue of strategic importance is an imperative. We can no longer close our eyes to the truth.�� (Quote)

Can anyone really disagree with this? I would just ask that the focus be placed on the institutions and rules and give up on blaming the foreigners for the problems in a corrupt industry.

[bosintang]

I thought the OP was reasonable and the questions she asked are quite fair to ask, especially given the climate of people geting deported for having fake documents and so on. I also find it curious that the only person to actually respond to the OP was Yata-Boy, the rest of you choosing to attack her directly rather than her questions or argument.


Yata-Boy nicely summarised my position. I only have a couple other comments.

[Wangja]

[lastat06513]

I am sorry, but I found the article to be too leftist, too equalitarian to seriously consider.

For a university student, her English is good. One might question how she could write such a good article.

1. She attended one of these "terrible" Hakwons and actually paid attention to what the teacher was teaching those days.

2. Her family is well-off enough to send her to Canada to receive an English education prior to attending Hanyang University (grant it- it is one of the top 5 in the country)

3. She has alot of foreign friends or even a foreign boyfriend (another foreign teacher or GI perhaps) with whom she speaks to that enables her to improve her English.

Actually, I'll let you all in on alittle secret that a birdie told me...

Even if Korea throws out all the illegal teachers and 6-month English-mongers from the country. One of the biggest source of illegal teaching will then come from the soldiers and dependants assigned at either YongSan AG, Osan AB or Camp Humphreys AG.
I already see advertisements from people connected to the military who are connecting soldiers with spare time with students who want to learn English or who just want to go to the military bases to get a piece of "American life".
The police, let alone immigration can't go on the bases to arrest people because of SOFA and English teaching isn't even covered on the list of crimes covered by SOFA. So whats to stop Private First Class ********* from offering his services for a fraction of the cost that it would cost to pay Mr. ************ who works at a public high school?
Nothing....there is nothing to stop him from doing it. And all the hype and press in the world would do nothing to change THAT situation.
What are they going to do, change the SOFA to include English teaching as a crime. You tell a US Senator this and he will laugh in your face. He would say "Why would you want to restrict a person's need to learn?"

That would be the end of it.

And maybe soon, you might even see ads from schools to camps looking to only hiring dependants with a SOFA visa so they can pay them lower pay (I think an army wife would be happy if she could make $15 an hour if it got her out of the house once in a while).

Even if the country starts restricting the source of illegal English education, more sources might become available.

She even points this out by saying