Public education in Korea has long been criticized for reducing the intellectual level of students by overemphasizing equality at the expense of individual differences in scholastic aptitude during the past three decades.
That accusation is not misplaced, given that almost all students are given cookie-cutter education at school. They use the same textbooks, work the same hours and learn from the instructors using the same teaching methods. This uniform public education has contributed to promoting expensive private tutoring in the nation.
Despite the wide spectrum of students' performance, access to special education programs for the gifted is limited to a very tiny portion, or 0.3 percent to be exact, of all students. No wonder classroom work, focusing on the middle group, is boring to bright students but too demanding for underachievers.
But at long last there is a welcome change: the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development is preparing to make elitist education available to 5 percent of all students from elementary to high schools, or a total of 400,000, by 2010. This improvement in public education should enhance the nation's competitive power in the future.
Under the ministry's plan, the top 1 percent of students in scholastic aptitude will be admitted to special educational institutions such as high schools specializing in sciences, foreign languages, arts or information technology. The next 4 percent will be eligible for special programs in ordinary schools, including one permitting students to participate in a college-level course and another categorizing them into distinct groups for curriculum and instruction tailored to each group's academic capacity.
The ministry is also planning to allow overachievers to shorten the period of education in a school and move on to a higher school. It is also considering permitting talented high school students to concentrate on literature, foreign languages, music or some other subjects in separate programs.
But notably missing from the ministry's reform plan is how to relate special education to college admission. If no change is made to the current college admission system, which does not acknowledge differences in performance among schools, the ministry's plan will certainly result in discriminating against the gifted.
Nor does the ministry say what it will do for late achievers. Schools will have to encourage those enrolled in ordinary courses to outperform themselves and move on to special courses for the talented. They will also have to take good care of poor bright students and ensure they will not be excluded from those programs because of their family backgrounds.
Another problem is how to train or recruit instructors for the "advanced placement" programs, under which students will take college-level courses, and the "tracking" programs, which will permit students classified into different groups according to their ability to participate in a suitable level of courses.
The ministry will have to reduce trials and errors in improving public education. All they have to do is to study what other countries have done in the past and not repeat their mistakes. After all, advanced placement, tracking and other special programs the nation is planning to adopt have long been practiced in many countries around the world.
The proposed improvement in public education will cost a huge amount of money, though the ministry has yet to come up with an estimate. But the government will have to bankroll the proposed elitist education without hesitation if the nation is to stop dumbing down gifted students, and to arm them instead with creative power and advanced knowledge that will survive fierce competition in the future.
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