From: wjin@cs.uh.edu (W. Woody Jin)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.korean
Subject: Re: education system
Date: 22 Jan 1993 07:02:38 GMT
Organization: University of Houston
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodin.cs.uh.edu

In article <1993Jan22.002239.20798@news.columbia.edu> jgl7@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Andrew T. Kim) writes:
> ...
>that's fine.  But look at it this way.  You might be able to prove that one
>education system might be good for the country, but is it good for YOU, too?
>Which education system is good for YOUR KID?

Good Point !
I think that the system is so big that it will be difficult to be so specific
to individual level.  The question can be :

     Which education system is good for YOUR CULTURE ?   

Adopting American education system to Korea will not work well, no matter 
how good it may be.
Education system of Korea is almost an exact copy of that of Japan, I think.
If there are differences, one of them could be : Japan has much money to
support their education system, and Korea doesn't.
In this matter, it will be a good idea to study the current situation of
Japanese education system (, which is also studied by American educators).
Anyone expert on this ?

Also, does anyone know how much would be spent to educate one person
from kinder garden to college, in some countries (Korea, America, Japan,
China ) ?  I think that what you pay is what you get  can also be applied
here ( I mean the quality of education).

>Sometimes you realize the major you chose in
>highschool was not what you thought it to be, so you want to change but the
>*system* does not allow you to do that.  

I majored in Electronics Engineering but I did not know that it was not
what I wanted to study, until I was taking Junior level courses.
In my friend's case, he could not bear any longer with EE, so
he screwed up his Senior level courses in EE and took lots of Physics 
courses. After one more year preparation, he went to Physics Dept in Graduate
school. He said that he had been happy ever since.

>Switching major is generally
>restricted and you will have to either learn to like what you have, or the
>hell with it and start all over, or keep being confused and frustrated.  In
>any case, it's either a waste of time or a way to achieve mediocrity at
>best.

Many colleges in Korea tried something to resolve the above problem.
It is so-called "KeYeolByeol". 
It simply didn't work, since, for example,  students in Engineering School 
wants Electronics Engineering, whether they really like it or not.
And the number of professors was far behind to catch the number of students.

I think that one of the main problem is : GanPan (how do you say it in Eng ?)

BTW, similar difficulty can be found in USA, also.
I have seen many students in College of Natural Science, who really wants 
to study Computer Science.   And since the number of such students are
too many, what they do is to flunk lots of students in core CS courses.
This also hurts some non-CS majors who just want to take some CS courses.
They found that the course is too competitive and drop.
But this is the case of some state universities.  Good private universities
may have better system (since they have much fewer students).

Even though American students have more freedom in choosing what they
want to study,  I don't think that they really choose what they want.
Mostly, they choose the fields which give them good jobs, regardless
of what they really like.

As a result,
it is a well known fact that there are so few American students in 
basic sciences, which are filled by, as someone already said, lots of
international students.
In Korea, students have much less freedom, but in fact, it acts as
balancing the number of students in all area (good for the whole country,
bad for the unsatisfied students).

It seems to me that we cannot get everything good ( 8-( ).

>I guess people speak from their experiences.  

Yes.  People cannot speak what they didn't experience ( 8-) ).

>Andy Kim


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|  |   |  |  |  |  W. Woody Jin (wjin@cs.uh.edu)       (o o)      Moo.... 
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