Education in Korea…. What do you think of it?

As someone who experienced elementary school education and western side of education, I know how it is different. I felt it through my skin.

To be simple, Korean education is fixed and western is not. Fixed means no creativeness. Korean education does not require any creativeness nor personal thought. It is rather based off from the textbook that was given from the school and study only from it. You don’t need to know why it is like that or how it became like this but rather memorize just because it is on textbook and what teacher said. It was just recently when they started to ask about personal opinions and ideas toward certain perspectives or facts but it is still lacking to show individual self. Of course it doesn’t mean students in Korea do not have their own perspectives and ideas toward what they are learning.   Some do but not all of them. To me, when I was in elementary school in Korea. The way to study for the quiz or test was to memorize what is on the textbook and statistical number. For math, just memorizing equations so I could use them to solve problems.

For Western education, it is different. They do have some parts where you have to memorize some factual information but in class, teachers explain why it is like that through various activities that involve ourselves to experience or to show videos and others that is much easier to understand. In high school, doing science, we actually do dissection to see how and why the system is like and what is actually like. It is more intriguing, interesting and easy to memorize.

Not only from learning but also we know when communicating with teachers. In Korea, when you are to speak to teacher or the class is the time when teacher asks question to be answered from students. You do not just speak your ideas in but you raise your hands up to be picked to speak. Then you stand up to say it out loud. On the other hand, in western education, you are given any time to speak out loud about your ideas and freely interact with teacher and other students about the answer that you have. There is mostly not fixed answers but more of personal ideas and thoughts.

Even in university, this can be shown. Recently I saw interesting slideshow where it shows the difference in Korean and Western universities. When giving lectures, professors in Korea do not provoke questions but rather just say what he has to teach and facts that will be on test. For western universities, it is rather giving students questions or topics that will lead to natural conversation about the idea that students may have.

Both sides have advantages and disadvantages but these are main things that I felt was some what “Asianess” and basic knowledge on what I am going to write next.

What are some of your thoughts?