Addendum

Not all entries will be criticism of schooling in Korea, I swear! But this one will be (this is in my nature and training)...I anticipate posting fun shit soon :P

Among other ideas, my school's director plans to add to our offerings extremely regimented, basic instruction in spelling and phonics, organized according to a standardized curriculum offered by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Though perhaps appropriate for very early second language learners picking up the basics, the materials are subdivided into a large number of finely gradated exercises, each highly similar to one another, perhaps to the point of mind-numbing. The Director actually considers our current varied, contextualized, dynamically adaptive style of instruction superior in instilling language ability at a variety of levels.

So why the switch? While I initially naively assumed that the demand for English language Hakwons stems primarily from a desire to raise children who will be competitive in application for schools abroad and international business, this is primarily not the case. Instead, the process of application to the more competitive universities and even high schools demands preparation for standardized testing of English language ability. As with their counterparts in the US, these tests assess primarily level of preparation for specific tests, rather than more global deployment of skills in relevant contexts later in life.

Again, as with the US, it is likely that an original impetus to engineer a population more able to excel in professional life has transmuted into disciplined submission to long hours of rote repetition for its own sake. It seems that once routinized into mass-institutions, genuine ethics of personal development tend to fall by the wayside. However, because routinized mass-educational provide metrics to assess the success of their own according educational practices, the failure of mass-education to meet its own goals of social design remains concealed. Parenting practices too are fashioned in the image of dominant metrics of mass-education, measuring the success of educational programs and their own students in terms of preparation for nationally uniform, quantitative measures. It is for this reason that my school's director has little choice but to offer this sort of program.