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“Obama is wrong about Korean education”

May 29, 2014

U.S. professor says Korea has to move on to the next stage

Yong Zhao, an education professor at the University of Oregon, speaks during an interview with The Korea Times Friday at Chadwick International School in Songdo, Incheon. (Courtesy of Chadwick International)

By Jung Min-ho

President Barack Obama lauded Korean education during his State of the Union speech in 2011, likening the teachers to “nation builders. ” But Yong Zhao, an education professor at the University of Oregon, thinks the president was wrong.

The educator believes Korean teachers need to break the “illusion” that they are doing well just because their students get high scores in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which he thinks only hinders the nation’s necessary education reform.

“Obama is absolutely wrong,” Zhao said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “For Korea and China to grow more, their (education) system needs to change.”

Zhao visited Chadwick International School in Songdo, Incheon, last week to give a special lecture about how the education system should meet challenges in the era of globalization. He met with Incheon city education officials to share his insights and expertise. It was his first visit to Chadwick.

In the 2009 PISA, Korea’s 15-year-olds ranked fourth in science (excluding Shanghai and Hong Kong), second in mathematics and first in reading.

He thinks the rankings only “create illusory models of excellence, romanticize misery and glorify educational authoritarianism.”

“PISA shows Korea is doing great; thus, Korean education should not change,” he said. “If you reform, it will make you score less … This makes it impossible for you to change.”

He sees PISA as today’s “most destructive force” that impedes progress of education around the world. And the worst part of PISA rankings is that other countries, obsessed with short-term achievement, blindly imitate countries like Korea.

“Asian countries like China, Singapore and Korea score very high. Everybody thinks we have the best education. So people from other countries copy (them), it destroys their advantages (in their own system),” he said.

Zhao’s works focus on the implications of globalization and technology on education. The China-born scholar has authored over 100 articles and 20 books, including “World Class Learners,” which won the Society of Professors of Education Book Award last year.

For the past half century, Korean education has played a vital role in lifting the country to where it is now today. But for the next 50 years, he believes, Korea will have to revise its authoritarian education system and snap out of its obsession with scores, for further prosperity.

He noted the strength of Korean education, which contributed to the country’s economic growth in the 1980s and ’90s, may not be useful for the creative economy in the 21st century, “where we have the most educated bartenders in history.”

“Korea passed the stage,” he said. “Old education system was very good for producing workers for assembly lines. But what you need for the next stage, to become an advanced country, you need innovators.”

In authoritarian systems, governments, teachers, parents are the authority; students have to comply with them, he said. “There, they do some things they do not like. They do not even know what they like.”

The biggest problem of the top-down teaching is that students cannot learn beyond what their teachers tell them. Besides, once they get into college, many of them stop learning because learning is just a means of achieving their goal, not the purpose.

According to QS World University Rankings 2013, only two Korean universities made the top 100 list. They were Seoul National University, ranked 35th, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, at 60.

“We are great students only before college,” he noted. “We focus on scores; we focus on getting to best universities; we focus on rote memorization; we do not focus on their joy of learning.”

Zhao received his B.A. in English language education from the Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in Chongqing, China, before earning his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He is the presidential chair and director of the Institute for Global and Online Education at the University of Oregon, where he also works as a professor in the department of educational measurement, policy and leadership.

His serious message is this: for countries to succeed, they have to nurture creativity, which can be accomplished by passion-based learning.

“We need more creative students. Our children are not as creative. And they are under a lot of pressure with too much homework and private tutoring. That has damaged their happiness and they are not as confident,” he said.

He said education should focus on developing children’s strengths, not “fixing their deficiencies. ” He also believes good education is more than just instruction of course content.

“It is a whole, entire experience of your life; who you talk with; where you play; what you talk about,” he said. “Many Asian parents misunderstand. They think education is what their children learn from their teachers.”

With the education market around the world increasingly opening, international schools, which have different values and systems, will challenge the old systems, he said.

“I hope globalization will bring different education models like Chadwick. It could challenge the old system like the iPhone changed the game,” he noted. “It is like a bringing in a different definition of good education.”