What do you all think of this?
http://asiancorrespondent.com/69672/seoul-has-nations-first-high-school-for-mixed-race-students/
For more background info, I also strongly recommend reading this:
http://asiancorrespondent.com/66424/skorea-too-many-bi-racial-kids-not-getting-an-education/
When
I first heard about The Global School and the Seoul Dasom School, I
thought, "How ridiculous. That's racial segregation. Those Koreans
really don't know anything about eliminating racism." However, after I
read the article, I began to see a lot of very viable reasons behind
this. First of all, the goal is not simply to segregate students of
different races, or even to just protect them from bullying. The main goal
is to keep at-risk students from dropping out of school. Of course,
it's no coincidence that so many multiracial children are at risk. In
the second article, they cite the reasons of poverty as well as cultural
and language barriers, and bullying. But when dealing with students
who are at risk, it takes a lot of skill and effort, and you need to maximize your resources. This brings me to my second point.
Multicultural
families in such high numbers are a relatively new thing in Korea,
which means that those 'high numbers' really aren't very high. If you
need bilingual teachers to help these students get through school, you'd
have to hire some for every school in which there are even a couple or a
handful of these children. In America, the secondary language of the
country is Spanish. In so many communities (like where my dad teaches),
30 or 50 or 90% of the kids might be coming from Spanish speaking
homes. So OF COURSE, it makes perfect sense to hire a significant
number of bilingual Spanish-English teachers to help those kids. But in
Korea, I'm betting that the percentage of multiracial kids in each
school is still fairly low, and they're not all coming from the same
linguistic or cultural backgrounds either. There are kids who are
half-Japanese, half-Vietnamese, half-Cambodian, half-Filippino, just to
name some of the more common ones. There is no dominant secondary
language in Korea (well, except English). The point is, it's simply not
practical to hire so many bilingual teachers and spread them
across so many schools to help such a small number of students. I'm
sure that the Department of Education can't afford that. Especially
when you start thinking about middle and high school, in which there's a
different teacher for each subject. Can they really hire biligual
teachers for every subject? Bilingual teachers for the Japanese, and
the Filippino, and the Vietnamese, and the Cambodian students, who
probably number in the single digits at each school? It's impossible.
If
they're going to address this problem right now, and address it well, I
think it makes more sense to do what they're doing. They are trying
for some integration (80% multicultural and 20% pure Korean), and it
seems that they are trying to make it a great school where the students
can get the extra help and attention they need. I mean, come on, 15
students per class? That's awesome. Who wouldn't want to go to that school?
Even
if this isn't a perfect form of integration, and even if you could
accuse them of failing to teach Korean children racial tolerance by
mostly segregating the multiracial kids, they are helping the
multiracial students to succeed and move forward in life--to move up in
Korean society, rather than continually falling to the bottom,
generation after generation. Just look at the 2nd and 3rd generation
immigrant children in France. How many times have we heard of them
rioting, burning cars, turning into criminals because they keep failing
in school, and can't find jobs, and don't see any opportunities for
themselves, anywhere? Success and upward mobility is in itself is a
kind of integration, and if it keeps the multiracial children from
falling to the bottom of the heap, over and over again (as poor children
often do in America), then I am all for it.
