Hagwans = For Profit Education = WORST IDEA EVER!!!
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Schools are not businesses. They will never be businesses, they can never be run as businesses and no teacher can be viewed as an assembly line worker. The mark of business is to turn a profit, not educate. As such, for profit education is, but itself a rotten idea. It is worthless and counter-productive, since if a business cannot make money, it will cut corners. Education is not something you can measure in tangible areas, like pounds of roast beef. Education takes YEARS to develop in a person. Education today will not be felt for another twenty years. Education is long term, business only care about short term. As such, Hagwans are the worst idea in education since high stakes standardized testing, since education gears itself in HSST systems to teach to the test and nothing else. I hope the hagwan system fails, but I'm beginning to see that Korean educational philosophy is about 50 years behind the rest of the world. I'm surprised female teachers can get married and have kids in Korea. Education here is a joke. |
||
 3/7/2009 7:57 pm |
Education sucks man... Imma gonna kill the person who invented schools.
| ||
3/7/2009 11:39 pm |
Interesting...schools are not businesses...very interesting... ...me being a teacher of sorts myself. I agree on the long-term aspect of educating; I also agree on your statement on the high stakes involved in standardized testing. I can readily remember an article appearing in the New York Times describing kids studying for an entrance exam to an elite, tuition-free middle and high school, Hunter College High School. To me, this is a curious mix of good news and bad news about education in our time. The good news is hearing about kids and families who are motivated to work like crazy for an academic goal – and, far from thinking they need to apologize for their interest, they are happy and bubbly about their academic focus. "The five girls and seven boys at Elite on Wednesday seemed to delight in their onerous routine, unwilling or unable to imagine life any other way." The bad news is that they had to compete for space at all at a great school! Why is there be a break-point for these kinds of kids? If you miss the exam cut-off, why should your educational experience wind up taking a nose-dive? Ponder this vocabulary lesson item described in the article: "The puzzle of the moment was the word "resentment." Some students had been stumped by it on the practice test. . . "Pretend your friends are applying to Hunter," [the teacher] said. "There’s a chance that the person who didn’t get in might feel a little resentment they didn’t get in. They are upset the other people got in, with a little jealousy." Not to mention that the focus of all this 'intense educational activity' at the time was not deeper learning – ...but test prep. Ah, business as usual... "Elite, which opened in 1986, is one of several cram schools in New York that had imported the year-round enrichment programs of the Far East as well, giving students the chance to forfeit evenings, weekends, summer break and winter vacation for test preparation." "’Our teacher said using high-level vocab will increase your chance of passing,’ [one student] explained." One hopes, of course, that this sort of education is actually aligned with skills that are useful beyond the few hours of an assessment,... but that would depend pretty critically on the design of the assessment itself as well as the instruction used to prepare for it, hmm? The single-mindedness of the focus merely on entrance to an elite institution is widespread outside the US. Several pockets within our society are quite obsessed with this (some Manhattan parents end up in therapy for anxiety about pre-school admission tests alone, I hear). On a whole though, I believe that far fewer families here are as focused on getting at least some of their kids into "extreme education" compared with some of these other countries. Asian families and their students in this country are notorious for this even to the point of doling out cold cash to 'buy' it. Whether you look in Europe, e.g., at France's Ecoles Polytechnique, or in India, there will always be this 'amazing scramble' for places at the elite engineering IIT institutions, or the annual exams in parts of Asia. There will always be the Willie-Wonka-esque golden educational tickets (and top dollar paid to attain them) waiting for a hard-working($)few, while others... think of themselves as "stuck." This is nuts! Not the wonderful support for student to achieve their best, or the focus on giving student’s the best possible environments in which to achieve – that’s great. But that this gets funneled down to one assessment, for a limited number of high quality slots? Damned nuts! At most, there are an array of factors that allow people to excel. Often arbitrary external discontinuities create conditions for success that have nothing at all to do with absolute potential for success. Equal opportunity does not success ofr all. Opportunity, therefore, cannot be paid for. Look at highly successful hockey players,for example. You'll find that they are almost all born within a few months of each other – and this has been true for many years. There's not something magical in the angle of the sun – rather, it's tied to arbitrary cut-off dates for ages in various leagues, which automatically give an advantage to those kids who are bigger, i.e., older, at the point where that arbitrary cut-off applies. These kids then do better in their first year as tots, which gets them into better next-year programs, and so forth – the cycle of reinforcement of an arbitrary environmental variable early on ends up restricting who becomes a great hockey player. Not because of any intrinsic characteristic of the children themselves, or even their willingness to work like crazy, but because of the interaction between a birthday and an arbitrary league rule. Indeed, great success flows from great support, and a lack of (often valueless) barriers, as much as from individual effort. They, therefore, shouldn't be putting more of these 'barriers' in place - they should remove them! Educational systems really need more options – a continuum of environments in which all can find themselves as challenged as they can stand it (wherever that level is for them), and which supports hard work over many years as the only route to mastery. The education system also needs an overhaul as well as better ways to eliminate, or at least get around, arbitrary barriers (for profit education??  ) that make it difficult to maximize the potential of the widest number of kids: The number of places in a local school that does support certain kids properly, a lack of other close-to-equivalent opportunities for those "almost there," birthday cutoffs, and arbitrary rules and expectations about how long it takes to master complex materials. For profit education does sound like corner-cutting if anything else. If students need an hour and a half to master their math instead of an hour, they should be given opportunity to take that time. If they need to spend more time coming up to speed on a subject, then the course load and levels can and should be adjusted. Opportunities to learn should be built to match what’s needed to succeed – indeed, time and real work has to happen, and supports there for families to deeply engage with the student and the materials and make it happen. Being able to create the supportive, fear-free, environment that encourages learning, no matter what level the child is at, is what education is all about...to struggle productively: To work at the boundary of what they’re really capable of, and to enjoy the hard-won progress (whether fast or slow) that comes from deliberate practice with well-designed instructional approaches. I keep at it with my homeschooling – and the personal investment I am making, of love, time, and effort, is very hard work,not business as usual, and that means that my kids are not limited by any entrance exam or geography from getting a world-class start to their lives! Hagwans. Thanks for the new term ...for my vocabulary, that is.  "Only a few things are really important." -- Marie Dressler
| ||
3/8/2009 1:21 am |
It's part of capitalist system where everything is commodity. If you actually look at English hagwon, you will see how they are commercializing Caucasian teachers to attract more people. And many hagwon won't even hire someone who is black regardless of his/her educational background because most of Korean mothers won't send their children to hagwon where teacher isn't white. Corruption is common phenomena in Korean education system where there are many exchanges of "envelop" from student's parents to teacher. And as much as hagwon is problematic, you also have to understand that hagwon is attracting more people because actual public education system have failed. Koreans' current education philosophy was actually originated by Western world during the "Enlightenment era" as Koreans were uncritically being "modernized" and "Westernized". But thing is by now, majority of Western world have abandoned such backward custom while Koreans are still uncritically adopting that backward custom. "If I could lead you into the promised land, i could lead you back out again."
| ||
3/8/2009 3:15 pm |
Scratch that.... I should not have commented. "Only a few things are really important." -- Marie Dressler
| ||
3/8/2009 6:45 pm |
you really look like mike piazza infront of the mets flag
| ||
3/8/2009 6:50 pm |
Korean words written in English are sometimes confusing even for Koreans lol. When I first read Hagwans I was like "What the heck is 해관?" lol
| ||
3/9/2009 4:31 am |
Korean words written in English are sometimes confusing even for Koreans lol. When I first read Hagwans I was like "What the heck is 해관?" lol Hay gwan? I can read Korean. . .don't know what it means, but I can read it.
| ||
3/9/2009 4:35 am |
It's part of capitalist system where everything is commodity. If you actually look at English hagwon, you will see how they are commercializing Caucasian teachers to attract more people. And many hagwon won't even hire someone who is black regardless of his/her educational background because most of Korean mothers won't send their children to hagwon where teacher isn't white. Corruption is common phenomena in Korean education system where there are many exchanges of "envelop" from student's parents to teacher. And as much as hagwon is problematic, you also have to understand that hagwon is attracting more people because actual public education system have failed. Koreans' current education philosophy was actually originated by Western world during the "Enlightenment era" as Koreans were uncritically being "modernized" and "Westernized". But thing is by now, majority of Western world have abandoned such backward custom while Koreans are still uncritically adopting that backward custom. Hmmm. . .would explain why people pull of my yarmulke, point and laugh at it and act like unbridled ignoramuses most of the time? Education is only 600 years behind, but the attitudes seem the same time frame behind! Oh, a homogeneous society with its ethnocentrism! BTW, uncritically adopting? Most Asian culture is uncritical, which is why the family name comes first. It's called groupthink, and it doesn't lend itself to critical thinking skills. It leads to regimentation, which is what most Asian culture is. . .regimented. Classical Conservatism at work, where you are what you're born as.
|
 |
 |
 |
| Become a member to comment on this blog | ||
 |
|
