Boo Korean Education System!

Following on the heels of a particularly good weekend has come a particularly shitty Monday. I suppose it's all my fault, I said (TWICE) on Sunday that I would be basically coasting this week, since I'd only be doing review worksheets in my classes. Reviewing is important! Especially in language learning, and ESPECIALLY when Teacher is burnt out at the end of the semester.

In doing the review worksheet, however, I learned an important thing about the students: most of them are morons.

That's not fair. Most of them have just been COMPLETELY failed by the Korean education system. There was a section on present continuous (or progressive) verbs, like "I am playing", and instead of filling in "am playing" in the blank, all any (and I mean each and every single one of the students) of them could come up with was "I playing". I realized that I needed to do a quick review explanation of the present continuous so the kids could do the worksheet without me going absolutely effing nuts, so I set it up. We went over the first question and then we conjugated the present continuous for "to be playing". It was all set up in such a way that at the very least, the smarter students would be able to make the leap from "I am playing" to "We are swimming".

Nope.

This time, it was "I am playing" (because it was written on the board) and "We swimming". I realized, after some reflection, that this is largely because they way they are taught this verb construction in the textbook omits the function of the auxiliary "to be" verb, focusing only on the -ing verb. All they are learning is "swimming", not "am swimming". Indeed, at no point in the elementary school curriculum are they ever even formally taught the verb "to be", they are just supposed to somehow pick it up from the rest of the lessons.

I suppose there is some merit to this - it allows that particular function of language to develop organically or whatever, but that just doesn't happen in this country. The reason? Simply put, the Korean education system doesn't value problem solving or critical thinking; rather, it prizes an ability to memorize facts by rote as the most important part of a person's education.

The result? Children cannot pick up the pattern from "I am playing" and apply it to "We are swimming". Put in larger terms, the adults in this country have a serious problem-solving deficit. Unless they have been specifically told one way to solve a problem, it is a complete mystery to many adults here. Take, for instance, traffic problems. In narrow streets, the buses tend to assume they have the right of way. So naturally, instead of reversing to manoeuvre around a car that has been parked unfortunately far out into the street. the bus driver will lay on his horn to indicate that the driver of said car needs to come out and move the car.

Writ larger, this is a country where there is only one solution to any given problem. It is immaterial how inefficient that solution might be, or how much better a solution you might come up with is, that is the one solution they learned and therefore that is the only solution that could possibly be implemented to solve the problem.

Ludicrous.

NB: I realize that this is a pretty big generalization of an entire country. And I really don't generally look upon places as a monolithic whole. But I think anyone who has been in South Korea for a while can tell you about this phenomenon, and the fact is, it starts early. Until a greater effort is made to teach children problem solving and critical thinking skills, innovation and creative solutions will not be found in this country, at least not on any wide scale.

/Rant over