On Jeju Island, famous for its tangerine groves, pearly beaches and honeymoon resorts, South Korea is conducting a bold educational experiment, one intended to bolster opportunity at home and attract investment from abroad.
By 2015, if all goes according to plan, 12 prestigious Western schools will have opened branch campuses in a government-financed, 380-hectare Jeju Global Education City, a self-contained community within Seogwipo, where everyone — students, teachers, administrators, doctors, store clerks — will speak only English. The first school, North London Collegiate, broke ground for its campus last month.
While this is the country’s first enclave constructed expressly around foreign-style education, individual campuses are opening elsewhere. Dulwich College, a private British school, is scheduled to open a branch in Seoul this month. And the Chadwick School of California is opening a branch in Songdo, a new town rising west of Seoul, around the same time.
What is happening in South Korea is part of the global expansion of Western schools, a trend fueled by parents in Asia and elsewhere who want to be able to keep their families together while giving their children a more global, English-language curriculum beginning with elementary school, and by governments hoping for economic rewards by making their countries more attractive to foreign investors.
“We will do everything humanly possible to create an environment where your children must speak English, even if they are not abroad,” Jang Tae-young, a Jeju official, recently told a group of Korean parents.
By inviting leading Western schools, the government is hoping to address one of the stress points in South Korean society. Many parents want to send children abroad so they can learn English and avoid the crushing pressure and narrow focus of the Korean educational system. The number of South Korean students from elementary school through high school who go abroad for education increased to 27,350 in 2008 from 1,840 in 1999, according to government data.
However, this arrangement often resulted in the fracturing of families, with the mother accompanying the children abroad and the father becoming a “goose” — by staying behind to earn the money to finance these ventures and taking occasional transoceanic flights to visit.
This trend has raised alarms about broken families and a brain drain from a country that is already suffering from one of the world’s lowest birthrates. Many of the children who study abroad end up staying abroad; those who return often have trouble finding jobs at Korean companies, regaining their language fluency or adapting to the Korean way of doing business.
Lee Kyung-min, 42, a pharmacist in Seoul whose daughter, Min-joo, 12, attended a private school in Canada for a year and a half, said she knew why families were willing to make sacrifices to send their children away.
“In South Korea, it’s all rote learning for college entrance exams,” Lee said. “A student’s worth is determined solely by what grades she gets.”
She added that competition among parents forced their children to sign up for extracurricular cram sessions that left them with little free time to develop their creativity.
“Children wither in our education system,” she said.
Min-joo’s parents believed that exposing her to a Western school system was worth the US$5,000 they paid monthly for her tuition and board, 10 times what they would have spent at home.
RSS