After what seems like months of interrupted bad news, Lee Myung-bak (barely) got a win in yesterday’s Seoul Superintendent Education election (Yonhap):
In the close race, voters chose Kong Jeong-taek, 74, the incumbent superintendent of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education backed by Lee’s conservative ruling party, over his leftist challenger, Jou Kyong-bok, a college professor and long-time civic activist.
Kong won 40.08 percent to 38.87 percent with four minor candidate spliting the rest of the vote.
Jou, the unofficial candidate of the Korean Teachers Union, almost slipped in there as several candidates split the conservative vote, as the KT noted.
As you could guess, the Hanky supported Jou (also spelled “Ju” or “Joo”) while the Chosun and the DongA bashed him and his KTU friends.
So what does this all mean? The obvious answer (and the obvious is all I know on this one) is that MB will have an ally in Seoul who will push his education reforms. That goes a long way in getting the reforms implimented in the rest of the country since the hinterland tends to follow the capital city’s lead.
BTW, the Yonhap piece noted that this is the first time the superintendent’s post was directed elected. Previously the post was filled by a vote of teachers. Talk about agency capture!
6 Comments
Will it really be a win? I doubt the KTU will be overjoyed. Could they force him out and make LMB fall back on this as well?
Doesn’t the Kong family claim descent from Confucius?
Although any win over the forces of the Korea Workers Party is preferable to continued Communist control of the schools, I’m unconvinced that a 74 year-old heir to Confucius is going to bring the kind of real reform that the Korean education system needs.
My guess is Kong’s prescription will be more of the same — plus “work harder!” — only without the Communist ideology. What Korean schools really need is a student:teacher ratio less than 60:1 and less focus on rote memorization.
You know, students are performing worser with the United States NEA enforcing a much smaller ratio of students to teachers in the US.
I did fine in Korea with 50 to 60 kids to one elementary school teacher. Amazingly, everyone learned to read, write, and do math.
I swear.
In college, they also try to sell the ratio thing, but besides letter of recs, I didn’t see much of an advantage in small class or big class.
Ultimately, American teachers are lazy. I bet you they go home earlier than the Korean ones, too.
Exactly what type of reforms are we talking about here?
#4, Teaching kids who really started the Korean War.
Exactly right Brendan. The incumbant, Kong, will just deliver more of the same until 2010. Joo wanted to trash the present education system and starte from scratch. It’s a Hellerian problem really. The biggest issue in theis country bar none is the crap education system. But the people have been forced into military education for so long they don’t realize they are too poorly educated to realize it. I bet the voter turn-out was like around 15%, right? How can Korea go global when people are trained to hate everything foreign?