hankyoreh

The presidential transition team lacks anyone who knows anything about education and is increasingly going in the opposite direction from the way it should be going. The “dormitory-style” (gisukhyeong) public schools it says it wants to start building in fishing and agricultural regions next year are going to be the first to have all subjects taught in English, part of the transition team’s plan for English immersion. As if trying to make themselves agreeable, superintendents of education in the country’s provinces and independent cities called for English immersion to be expanded as soon as possible. It looks like they are trying to sacrifice the whole of secondary education just for English.

Immersion education began in the 1960s in Canada, and has since spread to a small minority of countries such as Hong Kong and the Philippines. These are countries that use English as their national language, or as one of their official languages, and thus have no need to debate it. Countries where English is learned as a foreign language do not have programs such as these. There is therefore no analysis as to how effective it is, but it would seem clear that it makes students lose their appetite for regular classwork and damages the overall quality of instruction. A few universities are doing immersion classes, but there is an outpouring of criticism that these classes are not living up to what they were supposed to be.

The World Economic Forum, or WEF, ranked Finland first in national competitiveness for 2003, 2004 and 2005. The International Institute for Management Development, or IMD, named Finland as the one country outside the English-speaking world where it is most possible to communicate in English. Finland has no great secret. If there is anything notable about the way the Finnish do it, it is that starting in grade three in elementary school, students take two hours of English classes taught in English each week, and English language movies and television dramas use Finnish subtitles instead of getting dubbed. Something else that differs from Korea is that Finland does not have scholastic ability tests. The Finnish think that competition hurts students’ desire for learning.

The most horrific result of immersion education would be the destruction of the Korean language. People think and understand and affix meaning to everything in their own language. They lose their mental and cultural ability if they are suddenly required to think and cognize in English. Korean language ability is even valued in corporate hiring these days. The employment portal Job Korea did a survey last year in which 75 percent of personnel managers at Korean companies said “employees who are good at Korean generally do good work.” Nine percent said they do “especially” good work. When asked what employees are lacking, 6 percent said foreign language ability while 19 percent cited Korean ability.

The transition team needs to be prudent. Education policy determines the country for a hundred years hence. It needs to start with what is most basic: doing away with a university entrance system that ranks people by their grades, reducing the student-per-classroom ratio in order to allow for more well-tailored education and devising innovative ways to foster and support teacher development.




Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]