Why teachers in South Korea are scared of their pupils, and their parents
cnn.com
cnn.com
Now, on to what has changed in Korean society the past decade. TFA points to the symptom but not the cause with "the teacher-parent dynamic is unrecognizable from just a decade or two ago" and "parents are regarded as like a consumer, with consumer sovereignty." The big issue that TFA doesn't mention is demographics. With a declining student population, schools are desperate for cust--...err...students. I teach at the university level and academic standards have fallen through the floor. I'm not saying this is the only source of change, but I do think it is the main factor.
No way this is true. ~57% of teachers have Master's degree or higher. Bottom 20% of their class means they'd barely have enough GPA to graduate, let alone get into a MEd program.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/tables/ntps1718_fltable04_t...
1. Not everyone who becomes a teacher is getting a teacher major. English Lit scores well in two areas.
2. Special education is just very expensive babysitting, so they don't actually need to know anything.
3. If you ever wonder why kids aren't learning math well, this should explain it. Every teaching major is in the bottom half of scores. Fucking nurses score better!
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/types-of-...
https://future.utsa.edu/programs/undergraduate/mathematics-f...
This points to an important issue. I think most college-educated people are aware that at a typical university in the USA, the College of Education is separate from the College of Arts & Sciences. What they are probably not aware of without direct experience is the tremendous difference in academic rigor between Education and the Social Sciences. I've been nosing around Education programs for years and a good deal of what goes on in classrooms reminds me of my own experiences in junior high school. We like to joke about classes in Underwater Basket Weaving, but I once actually saw a 10-week, upper-division course in how to make use of a photocopier.
Now to the point. Among the Social Sciences, the field that has developed the most rigor in experimental standards and application of mathematics is probably Psychology. On the other hand, over in the College of Education, there is a field of Educational Psychology, which may be held up as an example of cargo cult science.
Published results on the psychology of learning attract a fair amount of attention on HN, but often the most dramatic reports are coming out of Educational Psychology, not Psychology. Readers need to be aware of the distinction between those fields to better adjust the credence they give to their output.
Something else to know about Korean universities is that admission to departments is competitive, and once students are accepted by a university, they will change departments before trying to change schools. I knew a girl who wanted to study biochemistry, but didn't make the cut in that department, so she went with an opening in silicon engineering, and now works at Samsung designing chips. I hear stories like that very frequently.
I guess silicon engineering isn’t as competitive as biochem because they have more spots for students (to support Samsung)?
Teachers should never have been disciplinarians. Their role is to teach kids. If kids are a behavior problem, the teacher should be allowed to expel/ban them from the classroom. This is the only thing that school administration needs to back teachers on. Education being compulsory for students who don’t want it is an extreme social mistake and one we should remedy as soon as possible. These disruptive students do far more damage to other good students than the benefit they provide if you “try hard” to make them work anyway. Not worth it.
The status quo in America gives teachers far too much power to decide the lifetime earning potential and fate of young students. Teachers are extremely tyrannical and that fact is never brought up at all in education discourse. (not even by the “anti teacher” right wingers)
A good example of this is journalism, which used to require little to no certification, but which today can require masters degrees for some positions.
In the end, the people that know and learn will have longer more productive careers, but there are enough sinecures in Korean (and US) society that the value of certification is overweighted.
I disagree. Children often don't see the value of education - partially because it's not shown to them.
This is foolish. Contrary to the current insistence, children do not know what they want. They do not understand what they need. They are not small adults, they are children and children don't think ten minutes ahead let alone decades. Adults with the best interest of children (ideally their parents) are the ones responsible for thinking of their futures and making them do stuff today so they can have a good tomorrow.
I have to say that given what adults are currently doing to the planet, I'm not convinced that they're capable of planning decades ahead or thinking of the best interests of their children either.
Like, I'm not thrilled to be the perpetual doomsayer of HN, but reading someone talking about decades into the future in the context of children really bums me out these days. As a child I really thought the adults would sort things out, but increasingly it just looks like doom, and that's hard to accept.
But classroom management / "discipline" is still a thing. Getting a group of 18 nine-year-olds to quiet down at the right time takes a certain degree of skill, and that will always be a part of teaching, at least for this age group.
A good education comes from a collaboration between parents and teachers. Parents are ultimately responsible for their child's education, and teachers serve as helpers pursuing that. A teacher's authority is delegated from the parent.
The parents mentioned in this article appear to wish to train their children to treat them, their teachers, and others with harassment and disrespect. If a teacher or school system isn't willing to help them in that endeavor, then they are pursing different goals - it's not a relationship that can work. One of the parties in that relationship can and should leave to go do something else.
> In the past, Ahn said, “If I could not give my personal phone number to them, sometimes some parents would come to the parking lot and watch and see and take a note of my phone number from my car, then they would text message me.” It is customary for Koreans to display their phone number in the bottom corner of their windscreen.
I'm amazed this can work without everyone being bombarded by spam calls etc.
Collecting these numbers is not scalable, though, so it's rarely used for spamming. If you're worried about strangers getting hold of all the personal information and social network profiles tied to your phone number, you can get an anonymized 050 number that forwards to your real number.
Besides, there have been multiple data leaks of pretty much everyone's phone number, and over 80% of all available mobile numbers (010 + 8 digits) are in use. It would be much cheaper for spammers to buy a previously leaked dataset or even just call random numbers.
And bazillion of others designs, including a piece of paper with a handwritten number.
The desired outcome is student education and actualization, not necessarily parental happiness. Some parents feel otherwise. Lots of Karens of all genders out there.
thadt’s comment is spot on (chef kiss): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38050798 Lots of other great comments in thread about what teachers face from parents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Federation_of_Teacher...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Federation_of_Teachers%2...
sure, there are legal protections given to officialized ones (and probably not-officialized as well) against employers, but that does not require for the word to be used only as "organization against evil employers"
This is absolutely true in North America as well, especially in more affluent neighborhoods.
"Ahn says she would like to see penalties for parents who make unfounded accusations against teachers or practical measures put in place so that mandated changes can be adopted in classrooms, such as removing a disruptive student elsewhere to allow teaching to continue."
So, it seems like they don't even have the power to make a student leave their classroom without fear of retaliation at the moment.
None of these charges are likely to stick under the revised legal framework, but the mere threat of a lawsuit can be tremendously burdensome to a young teacher just out of college. The teacher who committed suicide in Gangnam last summer was only 23 years old.
There could be some privacy issues, but an escrow process could help, plus classroom should not afford expectation of privacy.
The series itself is pretty good but I just found it funny that this particular scene broke my immersion in a sceries with interdimensional deamons that come to take souls to hell.
I think this kind of data analysis would be impossible in the U.S. and Canada, unless done by a government agency. I've never heard of a publicly available database[1] of cause of death in North American, let alone correlated with things like occupation, age, etc.
[1] Note that I'm talking about current data, not 100 year old historical data.
The suicide rate in South Korea is primarily focused on the elderly population that was abandoned while the nation grew, it's primarily focused on the financial collapse that occurred in the 90s when the nation's stock exchange was targeted by other financial markets in order to generate wealth a similar event has occurred in other Asian countries which forced several million people into poverty.
As for the other issues hyper competition is intense in most Asian countries, these issues are not unique to South Korea. In fact they are significantly worse in China and India. There is no culture problem but a systemic issue of a lack of jobs and opportunities and the overproduction of elites or highly educated individuals.
This happens in the US too. I think we generally need much stronger rules about when parents can contact teachers and what expectations there are about response times. You shouldn't need to spend every waking minute of your day on-call for a job that pays ~$60k/year. This kind of stuff is the norm now and people wonder why no one wants to go into the teaching profession anymore.