The complaints about the foreign teacher employment system continue, this time from the Seoul Shinmun.
Seizing on the recent drug arrests of several Korean English teachers deported from the United States for gang-related activities, the paper notes that because schools that illegally employ unqualified English teachers are hardly punished, students are getting cheated. It claims that rather than relatively expensive E-2 (teaching) visa holders, hagwon are employing tourist-visa holders and U.S.-raised Koreans who possess Korean citizenship.
The government shares in the responsibility, said the paper, because it punishes offending schools with only a slap on the wrist. No matter how many illegal teachers a hagwon employs, the regional department of education hands down only a 5-point punishment when they’re caught. You need a 30-point punishment to get slapped with a seven-day work shutdown. An official at Seoul Office of Education told the Seoul Shinmun that hagwon have a duty to check what kind of teacher they are employing, but realistically there are problems and it’s hard for the authorities to come down too hard on schools since, as the official said, it’s not like illegally hiring an unqualified teacher is a major crime or anything.
Another problem is the immigration law. If you get caught teaching on a tourist visa, the most you’ll be fined is 3 million won. And guess what—Korean-Americans are exempt from such fines. Hagwon-related laws, too, have no clauses pertaining to punishment.
From January 2003 to July of this year, 231 people have been busted teaching English on tourist visas. Only 27 of them—11.7 percent—were forcibly deported afterward. Most of the rest were simply told to leave the country, an order that doesn’t bar them from re-entering Korea whenever they want. This means all they need do is exit the country briefly, re-enter and pick up where they left off illegally teaching.
An Uri Party lawmaker told the Seoul Shinmun that a system is needed for citizens to inform on illegal teachers and that punishments must be strengthened.
The press head of the special committee on foreign teachers of the foreign language education committee of the Korea Association of Hakwon (yes, I guess there is such a position) told the paper that society’s unconditional preference for foreign English teachers must change, and that Koreans, too, are sufficiently capable of teaching English.
40 Comments
What an odd set of ideas set out there. It seemed like they were finally on the right track when it stated that there is a need for more serious penalties for the hagwons…but then it went back to the normal crap.
“An Uri Party lawmaker told the Seoul Shinmun that a system is needed for citizens to inform on illegal teachers and that punishments must be strengthened.”
While I agree with the fact that the punishments must be strengthened for the illegal teachers as well, the proposed witch-hunt WILL be a freaking disaster. Anyways, good to see that the real criminals (the hagwon owners) have finally been brought into the picture.
the private institute lobby is huge-and that’s only counting the over-the-counter money spent on protecting their fiefdoms. i would be surprised if the black money weren’t five to ten times the money spent legally to lobby.
nothing will change with that kind of money sloshing around.
Sorry, but to me, making such a fuss about such a small number of illegal immigrants borders on xenophobia. Consider this: there are 50000 illegal Korean immigrants in southern California alone. It’s believed there are at least 180000 illegal Korean immigrants in the US, and the number could be as high as…brace yourself…500 000 by some estimates.
Korean-Americans don’t have to pay the fines, eh? Very interesting. And so typical.
“An Uri Party lawmaker told the Seoul Shinmun that a system is needed for citizens to inform on illegal teachers”
This is the sort of thinking that has to change for the Korean justice system to improve (in one aspect). It is not the responsibility of citizens to track down and enforce the law, but that of police and prosecutors. I read an article in a Korean newspaper a while ago mentioning that there are now over 350 crimes citizens are encouraged to report for a reward. WTF? Encouraging amateur citizens to try their hand at policing as a part-time job is a dumbass idea that invariably results in chaos and poor or selective enforcement, and anyways represents a kind of proto-vigilantism or Red Guards-ism - who wants those?
A better alternative (in this case) would better training and clear ‘must follow’ policies for police and immigration officers. Why, for example, is Korean immigration letting people enter on 6 month tourist visas 10 or more times? Isn’t this obvious? Shouldn’t after at least their fourth time these ‘tourists’ be told that that is enough to see the country for now, and please visit Korea again in, oh, 5 years?
Why not have police stations assign an officer to make periodic random checks of hogwons to verify who is teaching there vs. who on paper should be teaching there?
For prosecutors, a “first fake teacher found closes your damn doors for a week - 2nd is a month and 3rd you, hogwon director, go to jail yourself for 3 months” policy would work wonders.
These are just suggestions, but I think they are all realistic and reasonable to addressing this problem - much more so then encouraging the average Mr. Hahn or ajumma Park to play police.
“It is not the responsibility of citizens to track down and enforce the law, but that of police and prosecutors. I read an article in a Korean newspaper a while ago mentioning that there are now over 350 crimes citizens are encouraged to report for a reward. WTF? Encouraging amateur citizens to try their hand at policing as a part-time job is a dumbass idea that invariably results in chaos and poor or selective enforcement, and anyways represents a kind of proto-vigilantism or Red Guards-ism - who wants those?”
Yeah, good point. We have the ‘Crime Stoppers’ programme in Canada…but in that the police looks for information about specific crimes that have already been commited.
Actively encouraging citizens to enform on their neighbors is dangerous. Just look at the number of innocent muslims that were jailed following 9/11.
I wonder to what extent this recent flurry of media reportage is in reaction to the bad press Koreans have been getting in the U.S. regarding Korean prostitution there and the arrest and deportation of Korean whores.
Dogbertt is onto something…here we have a case of sympathy for lady vengeance.
So the Korean media is saying that Korean laws suck? Only if they let foreigners off the hook, of course.
“society’s unconditional preference for foreign English teachers must change, and that Koreans, too, are sufficiently capable of teaching English.”
HaHaHa!!! Having seen dozens of Korean English “teachers” that can’t even speak 3 syllables of English, I found this statement to be the funniest thing I’ve heard since The Chappelle Show went off the air.
Then again, Maekchu, it’s obvious the foreign teachers aren’t getting the job done either. Kids go to native-speaker hagwons for 10 plus years, but can they construct even a simple English sentence when they get out? Whether this is the teachers’ fault or the kids’ fault is beside the point. You might as well have the Korean cleaning-ladies double up as teachers.
They ought to attack the root of the problem, instead of the aftermath of not addressing the problem — REMOVE THE COMMUNIST TEACHER’S UNION. By doing so, that will eliminate the possibility of crappy teachers from gaining employment opportunities.
One violation ought to shutdown a school for a month’s time.
–Remort
montclaire,
It does not who is in front of the class if the materials are crap. Plus, I don’t think it is entirely uncommon for the owners to tell the native speakers not to teach - but to play and keep the kids happy. Furthermore, the appearance of studying (ie. merely attending a hagwon) also seems to be sufficient for some (the adult classes).
Much more at work here than what it may seem on the surface.
Did you guys know a lot of the Korean juicy girls in Itaewon are hagwon teachers as well?
In all of your days here, how many hagwon owners have you met who
a)knew anything about education
b)knew anything about English
c)were aware of business standards and practices?
A hagwon is not a school, it is a license to print money for some unscrupulous characters. It is a business first and foremost, and the education part comes a distant second. What qualifications do you need to make sure mommy and daddy keep paying their W600 000 per month? Maybe I am cynical, but all this “let’s clean up the English teaching scene” is a joke compared to the shady stuff going on here.
What incentive is there really for a hagwon owner to stop hiring illegals? They are cheap, and when they are caught, he doesn’t have to so SFA about it…the hapless moron working there illegally can take the fall and Mr. Kim is free to repeat the cycle…all the while undercutting the wages and salaries of qualified teachers.
Oh yeah…if someone is dabbling into herbs and substances in Korea, they are fully aware of the risks. The more people who get booted out and the tighter it becomes for hacks to get into Korea to teach, the better off all other teachers are…
please edit “communist teacher’s union” for redundancy…
I wonder if a change to the visa system, ie allowing E2 holders to own their visa rather than the hagwon owners would see some of the shortages met and thus the numbers of illegals employed lowered. I think a minimum of Tesol certification would also go a way to raising the bar at hagwons.
hmmm. where to begin?
frack yeah! either the government needs to treat things equally under the law (specifically in regards to punishment) or the situation will always be the same or worse.
for hagwons changing the habit of hiring anyone who looks the part by looking at a picture or talking for a few seconds on the phone hiring for qualifications, merit, integrity, or just something that isn’t based on superficial perception.
most Korean teachers i’ve met are sufficiently capable of teaching a lot of Konglish. they fail dismally on grammar, usage, acquisition, and listening. and their capability is like that because of the hack universities they attended to learn English in the first place.
judge judy is right: hagwons are a fiefdom. it’s the spanky new class system in Korea. it decides who is better than who and where everyone is going based on a language most of them (the students) will hardly (if ever) actually use. imagine going to hagwons for years because of your obsessive parents just to learn how to speak one foreign tongue to people from other (i.e. Western) parts of the world that a lot Koreans would rather only stay briefly or at least long enough to drop wads of cash?
English education in Korea is more than just a reinforcement of preexisting class structures, it’s also a propaganda tool! it’s used constantly to goad and distract society from real issues. this article is more of the same fodder. lots of bitching and no action. things will change when Korea is able to retake all the territory China, Japan and Russia stole.
The Goat: even with crap materials, a good teacher (or someone who cares enough to put forth the effort) can teach anyone (provided the learner isn’t rebelling against the material itself).
But the “teachers” who just show up and play games all day to keep the kids and their boss happy are the biggest foreign part of the problem. They are participating in the ongoing fraud of the Korean people. I slap just as much blame on the lying, lazy-ass kids who complain to their parents when a teacher does try to break the system and perform the job function for which they were supposedly hired, teaching.
No illegals would mean significantly higher salaries for legal foreigners. And Koreans just can’t bear to see that happen.
Angrycareb,
So glad you have it all figured out. Perhaps you should write a book? Do lectures? Conduct seminars? The future is bright for someone that has figured out the secret of TESL/TEFL. Hell, even widely published PhD’s in the field have stated that “we have yet to devise a method which is capable of teaching anybody anything”. Congratulations.
The (hyperbolized) point was that those that many put in that position can hardly be called teachers. Most have little if no experience and are in dire need of a fairly strict curriculum. Instead, they are told to do nothing. How they react is a matter of their own personal character.
As for reference to the Korean teachers, there would appear to be some fault with the materials used in public education unless you are prepared to make a blanket statement that a large number of Korean teachers are not “good teachers”.
As for those “who just show up and play games all day to keep the kids and their boss happy” - they are not the biggest problem; they are a symptom.
How do the hagwons perpetuate the class structure if they’re useless anyway?
This is nothing new; hating waygook teachers has been going on for years and it usually starts about this time of year, too,
The english text book industry is a truely hopeless one that does not get the amount of negative attention it deserves. (can we really call that industry?! f**K now I need a friggin textbook too, I can’t speak my native language anymore)
So my wife works at one of these companies, and usually comes home late, because the president of her company likes to golf during the day when every one works, and harrass his employees during the night and on the weekends when everyone wants to recouperate.
She’ll come home and ask me whether this or that is a correct sentence in English, and invariably my answer is “Yes, thats perfect… why?” which will then unlease a torrent of disdaine for her Hwe-Jang-Nome and I get to hear how he comes in at closing time, sits down rips through everybodys work, stuff that was right to begin with, and replaces it with the most asinine konglish you can think of. Then to punish his employees the next day he will call a meeting, some running up to 9 hours, where he talks about anything from what a CEO of another company told his chauffeur in the morning to the crazed coke orgies he had in South America over ten years ago… but without fail, nothing to do with making an English text book. Unless you count the time he sat down with scissors, paper and a glue stick and literally made a friggin text book kindergarden style… for 8 hours
I shit you not folks.
And this is not some two-bit unkown book publisher mind you, their client base encompasses some rather famous hagwons…. which I think is best to leave unnamed. (honestly, does it really matter anyway?)
ok, I’ll admit it… I am a little jealous I wasn’t invited to the crazed coke orgy…
…and if the same standards were applied here in America, we’d have no farms or Wal-Marts left. Immigration enforcement rarely targets the businesses who employ illegal workers rather than the workers themselves.
Minutemanism? Naww… that’s not a word.
Well… the owners of the first two hagwons in which I taught had taught business administration themselves. Of course, we can always refer to the following hierarchy:
People who can’t do teach.
People who can’t teach administrate.
People who can’t administrate teach administration.
“English education in Korea is more than just a reinforcement of preexisting class structures, it’s also a propaganda tool! it’s used constantly to goad and distract society from real issues. this article is more of the same fodder. lots of bitching and no action. things will change when Korea is able to retake all the territory China, Japan and Russia stole.”
Well, the government will crackdown on private tutors and cram schools, making sure they tell reporters how much they were charging. Obviously, they aim at giving the impression that they care about the fact that higher income families have ‘unfair’ advantages over lower income families (makes people forget that many of the top politicians have kids married to relatives of the chaebol families, kids that have been exempted from serving in the military). They’ve even gone so far as publishing ’scientific’ findings that contradict years of language acquistion research. Yup, I’m not making this up. One one instance, they had a Korean professor conduct what was literally a textbook example of bad research (can’t remember if it was a textbook written by Nunan or by Brown, but I knew it was familiar, looked it up and it was right there in front of my eyes in black and white, clear as day). What they essentially did is took a group of younger kids (6-7 year olds) and taught them English with a native speaker for 2 weeks. They took another group, but this one with older kids (9-10 year olds) and had them taught by a Korean teacher. After 2 weeks, the kids from both groups were given the same English test. Of course, the 9-10 year olds got better scores because they have better test taking skills. Another problem with the experiment is that its short term. You simply can’t measure the benefits of learning a second language at a younger age or from a native speaker after 2 weeks. But, their conclusion? Shockingly, it was that kids who learn English at a younger age don’t speak English better than those who learn at an older age and Korean teachers produce help students to communicate in English better than native speakers.
Fer chrissakes, will some G.I. PLEASE go steal the KTX…?!
Goat, why are you so bitter?
if i could do an effective lecture, i would. if i thought standing on an air-con box at Nowon Station and preaching “The Perfect ESL System” would help, i would. if there was a secret to TESL (or any language), we’d all be outta these frack jobs and better for it. as to what “widely published PhD’s” state, who gives a frack? not me. besides, you missed my point: a good teacher can teach anybody regardless of the quality of the material as long as the learner is not rejecting what is being taught or the process of learning.
yes, many people who come here are sooo not qualified to do what is technically being asked of them. i was once this kind of person. but, taking an inexperienced person and sticking the best/strictest curriculum is not a solution, either. i agree fully, ‘how you react is a matter of personal character.’ as is how you choose to participate in the farce known as “Teaching English in Korea.”
by the “materials used in public education” i assume you mean the textbooks which students use in public schools, which are dubious interpretations of reality at best. and that is the only ‘blanket’ statement i’m willing to make. the ESL books, of which there is a wide and great variety from absolute crap to superb, i see no fault in the material itself. many hagwons choose books which are ridiculous crap or overly simplistic to ensure that all students can “pass” and appear to their parents as continuing to learn and excel at English. it’s just another facet of the charade. i find no fault with crappy material, just crappy hagwons insisting that said books be taught (if you can call that teaching) in a superfluous manner. i also find fault with “teachers” (foreign and domestic) who breezed over the content of a crappy book and then play a game which has nothing to do with anything the children came to learn in the first place.
it takes a certain kind of person to stand up to their hagwon boss and insist on actually teaching the crap in the book instead of just giving out the answers and playing a game. that kind of “teacher” is an extreme minority in this “industry”. most just decide it’s better to fake their job like everyone else, keep passing the buck, laugh all the way to the bank, and get all pissed and bothered when anyone (mothers, media, average Kim on the subway) complains.
lazy teachers (foreign and domestic): biggest problem. bad laws, number 2. lazy, inconsistent immigration, number 3. lazy, bad hagwon boss, number 4.
montclaire, ‘class’ in the the OED, definition #2:
my assertion was that in Korea, there is a perceived social status equated with English ability and English education background which creates a class structure.
but you’re just toying with me because your degree is real, right?
I know firsthand that there are some who report activities that they “think” could be a crime for whatever reason (personal vendetta, etc). The authorities follow up on this without first checking whether or not the alleged activity is indeed illegal. Sometimes they are polite about it, and sometimes they cite laws they know nothing about (either do not exist, or are misapplied), and seem offended when informed that certain activities are, in fact, explicitly legal.
Shit, this is almost as boring as the Metropoliticians 18 scroll-down pages of anyone who has ever disagreed with him.
Met - love ya, but give us a break. As Yossarian punched ya, “Your prose is too prolix.”.
No need to quack for 18 pages when we all know you, if you posted with some self-discipline, it could be one page.
Go on over and watch me taunt him to respond, y’all
the last thing most of you would want is to for korea to start cleaning up the trash of the hagwon industry as most of you would be swept out like so much vermin. then where would you go to get all your urges satisfied?
‘us has up to half a million illegal koreans.’
can you show me where you got that? yeah, i know. you made it up.
‘deport all the korean whores!’ dogbert
i’ll bet you’re one of their best customers, kermit. what is your weight, dog? about 120 pounds?
poem of the expat:
i hate korea
i hate koreans
i stay in korea
my choice
i have many urges
14 year old girl
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…….
Everyone knows the key to English acquisition is tongue-lengthening surgery!
William G:
I’ll do it if someone goes into cahoots with me and takes over the electrical control station so they don’t cut the power to my train.
pawikirogi…are you insinuating that Korean women are easier than Western women, or are you saying that there are more Korean prostitutes than western ones? I am not sure what angle you are taking by saying “then where would you go to get all your urges satisfied?”
Why are you trying to insult Korean women like that? You should be ashamed of yourself. Your discrimination seems to have no bounds.
Nulji, you hate white people, yet you live in the U.S.
Besides, I didn’t say deport all the Korean whores. You don’t need to worry about that, anyway. Under the INS’s “family reunification” policy, your mother gets to stay in the U.S. no matter what.
Vonjackass, you’ll find that bitter kyopo males often take out their insecurity and frustration on the safest, closest, and easiest target, Korean women.
Such vitriol toward women is also indicative of latent homosexuality.
As long as you have a have a four year degree, in ANY subject, you can be a juicy girl! That’s friggin crazy man!
Mark: I’m there.
VJ,
I think the main point is just that the Korean variety are better due to their innate dexterity and work ethic.
Pawikirogi, had you even bothered to check, you would have come up with the same numbers as I did. Just Google “illegal Korean immigrants” to see for yourself.