hankyoreh

During a briefing to President Lee Myung-bak on March 20, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said that it would officially carry out a policy to turn education into a free market, a previous pledge by Lee’s administration. Most of the contents of the policy have already been made public, but one remarkable aspect that had not been revealed until recently concerns the government’s plan to publicize information about the academic achievements of elementary, middle and high schools beginning in October, when the government will begin to rank individual schools across the nation based on the performance of their students. The measure is aimed at ensuring competitive education, and will also include a teacher evaluation system, the establishment of private high schools and autonomous public boarding schools, and the liberalization of college entrance examinations.

The issue of ranking public schools and disclosing student test scores sparked a controversy when an act outlining a new system under which information held by educational institutions would be made public was passed in 2007. At the time, there were no objections to the system because one of its main goals was to improve the education system. The theory was that publicizing information about educational programs, school lunch provisions, safety, school violence, behavioral problems, budgets and teachers would incite schools to improve their performance. The government decided, however, that the academic achievements of individual students would not be made public because it thought that doing so would generate more negative effects than positive ones. The government worried that public schools would be ranked; high school rankings, used to determine university admissions, would be revived; and that private education would flourish. The conservative Grand National Party disagreed, however, saying that the system itself would be meaningless if information on scholastic ability were omitted.

As some experts maintain, publicizing student test scores could contribute to an improvement in students’ ability to answer questions. In addition, it was expected that the plan would prompt negligent principals and teachers to improve their performance as well. Reviving the system now, however, is sure to cause critical side effects, the most important of which is that it could distort public education. In order not to be outranked, the nation’s schools will focus their curricula on teaching students how to answer questions on a few subjects. Other subjects will be sacrificed and education will turn away from fostering originality or the ability to resolve problems and there will be no opportunities in education for individual development or the cultivation of character.

Students are the ones who will suffer from the excessive focus on test-taking. Under the new plan, schools will have no choice but to treat students harshly in order to attain superiority over other schools. Students will suffer from a sense of oppression because they will have to study long after school hours. The biggest worry is that the high school ranking system will once again play a major role in determining university admissions. There will be no colleges that don’t use the revealed gap in scholastic ability to select their students. Apart from the irrational notion that younger students will be ranked based on the academic records of older students, students in regions and schools with poor educational conditions will be even more ignored by society and their potential neglected.

There is a place for competition in education, but it should not obscure the purpose of education altogether. The government plan to let schools nationwide hold the same examinations at the same time, and then publicize the results, coupled with the college entrance examination, will only serve to stifle public education.

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