Koreans Shudder at No School on Saturday

The title of the article in Bloomburg Business Week’s July 11 – July 17, 2001 issue shines a spotlight on the education ethic in the East Asian countries versus those prevalent in America. First, understand that the Koreans currently send their kids to two half day Saturday sessions a month and the government is proposing to do away with those sessions. Why? It seems they feel that more family time and play time for the children will result in more consumption which they want to promote.

As the title indicates Koreans, especially mothers per the article, don’t support the change. And the children they interviewed for the article don’t either. One mother said she was spending $1700 per month on tutoring classes. Another mother spends $2800 per month on math classes for her son. The conclusion of the article after interviewing a cross section of parents seemed to be that if the public schools weren’t open on Saturday they would sign the kids up for more private tutoring classes to take their place. One example was Charlie Lee an eleven year old who takes 15 hours of cram classes a week in English and math.

The East Asian countries dominate the top five places in the OECD assessments of reading, math and science. American students are ranked 30th of 34 OECD countries in math, 23rd in science, and 17th in reading. This, in spite of American spending on education being at the very top of all nations except for two small country exceptions.

Korean attitudes are sharpened by seeing what happened in Japan where they cut Saturday classes in 2002 only to reinstate them in 2009 after seeing their results in international testing steadily decline. From 2000 to 2006 Japan students went from first in math to tenth, 2nd to 6th in science and 8th to 15th in reading comprehension.

The mother who was spending $2800 per month on tutoring for her 13 year old son said, “I will make sure he gets whatever he needs.” Apparently the long honored Confucian reverence for education is being reinforced by the competition parents see from other nations who also see education as the best way to prepare their children for the increasingly stern global meritocracy.

This article was a reminder of how delusional we have been on education here. Our educators and politicians continue to work to maintain the status quo while touting all sorts of “polish the rotten apple” reforms they tell us will improve things but never do. How many decades do we need to continue harming kids before we listen to people like E.D. Hirsch who point out based on decades of study of our education system that, “the current system (different than that used by all of the world leaders doing better than we are) hasn’t worked and can’t work" (because it is based on technically wrong beliefs that are ubiquitous in our education cadre)? Too many cynically believe it is only the gap kids who are being harmed and “everyone knows they can’t learn anyway.” They can learn and the kids who do relatively well by comparison in the current system could learn far more if they were given the kind of rigorous experience with teachers who actually understand the subjects they are teaching.