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.
If the parents get to choose whether to send their kids to the regular or multicultural schools, and the DoE presents the trade-offs fairly, then I'm all for it. The U.S.'s school voucher debate notwithstanding, options aren't a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteSimple exposure to people of a different ethnicity isn't enough to reduce racism; it takes seeing that others aren't so different from oneself after all, and better yet can contribute to achieving shared goals. If the government is serious about increasing acceptance of minorities, then building a more ethnically diverse middle class should be one of its goals, and this seems a feasible way of going about it.
Nice point about the "ethnically diverse middle class."
DeleteAn interesting concept! I wish we had schools for at-risk kids here in the U.S. Instead, most of the at-risk kids are in the poorest schools with the fewest resources. They start out at a disadvantage and just become more disadvantaged as they grow up. This is a barrier to integration, equality and many other values we claim to own.
ReplyDeleteThe reactions in the comments section of the original article certainly were interesting. It is not surprising that a very homogeneous society would be so insular. Dealing with the rest of the world is a new thing there. Language does not seem to be the problem, as one comment noted. It is simply that they are not 100% Korean.
ReplyDeleteWondering if you have seen, as the Korean-American teacher did, that all sorts of aggression/bullying (toward the poor/the overweight/etc) is just ignored by the Korean teachers as "accepted behavior" because of their over-competitive society?
Yeah, it's definitely considered acceptable behavior (at least, teasing fat kids definitely is). I've seen the teachers join in calling the fat student a 'pig,' and I've heard that teachers in other schools do that too. The weird thing is the way the fat kids deal with it. They totally adopt it. I've had the fat kid in class come running up to me on the first day of school and say, "My nickname, PIG!" as if he were proud of this. The kids really don't seem hurt by it, they just take it in stride. When the teachers or students make comments about them being fat, they just laugh. I've only seen one girl who actually seemed embarrassed by it. Maybe the kids really do just roll with it as easily as they seem to, but I still wonder how much that hurts their feelings underneath. It must make them insecure, in a society that values being thin and beautiful so highly that they have the highest rate of plastic/cosmetic surgery in the world. But the teachers don't see it as a problem anyways.
DeleteTo be fair though, there is a BIG anti-bullying campaign going on in the Korean education system right now. They've had lots of meetings, rallies, posters, ads, and educational outings about the subject. My school went to see a musical last semester that was all about bullying in Korean high schools. And one morning before school we had to come early for an anti-bullying rally where the girls were marching and holding up anti-bullying posters. They even had local news reporters there. So they are trying to do something about it, but I think they're fighting a really steep uphill battle against the culture grain.
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