What's a parent to do when junior chooses to live in a tent?
By Petula Dvorak
YOUR precious children? The ones who had violin lessons and SAT tutors and years of orthodontia and organic lunches? They are now sleeping under tarps, in the mud, rain and frigid temperatures, in an encampment that is home to an epic urban rat infestation. And their new neighbours are a sizeable portion of America's hardcore homeless population. Next week, hordes of them plan to Occupy Congress, a protest that could spark confrontations with the US Capitol Police and lead to arrests.
They eat donated or dumpster-scavenged food - peanut butter, bread and doughnuts (sorry, Hostess, no Twinkies) were lunch the other day - or they may even go on a hunger strike.
Take that, helicopter parents.
These are the mothers and fathers who demanded laws for bicycle helmets, car seats and warning labels on every plastic bag and bucket in the universe. They had the home number of every teacher from preschool to college. And they've even been known to call up their grown kids' new bosses after junior didn't get a promotion.
But what happens when these highly groomed offspring go off and join the hundreds living in the Occupy movement camps? To whom do you file a complaint? Who gets the irate phone call? 'She still keeps asking me to come home. I get the calls. And the texts. Every day,' answered one 18-year-old Occupier in Washington's McPherson Square.
The camps are full of a wide range of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, sure. But the movement's biggest population and primary strategists are the 20- something Millennials forever burdened with their parents' insistence on participation trophies for every team member.
So now the Occuparents find themselves struggling with whether to support their child's participation in a sweeping, political protest movement and the fact that their cul-de-sac kids are living in total squalor.
Sam Jewler, one of the four protesters who staged a dramatic hunger strike in the name of DC voting rights, fasted for 11 days - until his parents nagged him into eating.
His dad, Bethesda resident Leonard Jewler, was featured in a Marc Fisher blog post years ago when he tried to answer parental school angst with a data analysis of whether kids from DC public schools ascend to the same calibre of colleges as kids who went to private schools.
After enough carping from the parents, young Jewler said he broke his fast last month with a glass of coconut juice and a bowl of miso broth.
'I was feeling pretty much the same way I was the last week, but my parents were becoming increasingly distressed,' Sam told The Post's Tim Craig. 'I didn't feel like it was fair anymore to put that burden on them.'
Eat. EAT!
SURE, there are some protesters whose parents are closing the door on them over this. One said his folks made it clear he doesn't have a home to come back to. Or there are guys like Chris, 18, who left his home in Maine 'pretty much because of my dad'. But for the most part, Occuparents aren't philosophically opposed to protesting. It's not the pearl-clutching that the hippies' parents did in the 1960s.
But it's just so, ick, out there.
'My mum thinks I'm insane. She keeps hoping I'll wake up some day. She's the one who needs to wake up!' said Rooj Alwazir, 23, who grew up in the Tysons Corner area and has to explain the Occupy movement almost daily to her 63-year-old mother.
The other day, she posted online that she's about to go 'Dumpster Diving for Occupy DC!' Her sister shot back, asking her why she had to go dumpster diving when she has a home and food and family so close by.
'They just don't get it,' said Rooj, who was laid off from a marketing job and hasn't been able to find work since.
Her 71-year-old father, a historian and poet, is down with the cause, she said. But he largely stays away from the tent city his daughter now calls home.
Mrs Annie Storr, however, has taken a full-immersion approach.
I met her the night that police encircled the camp last month and tore down a barn protesters built at one of the Washington camps. She was running along the line of the police barricade, trying to keep tabs on her son, Eli, and the other protesters being flex-cuffed.
'Eli has been arrested,' announced Mrs Storr, who stood out in the crowd like an L.L. Bean model at an Amsterdam body piercing convention.
At that point, her 20-year-old son had been at McPherson Square for just over two months. And she had visited him at least 45 of those days. She'd volunteered in the camp kitchen. And she'd spent one night in the camps. 'Just one,' she explained, grabbing her back.
Logistically, the visits were easy, since she works just a few blocks away, at the Corcoran College of Art + Design.
Extreme helicopter parenting? Maybe.
But Mrs Storr is also a Quaker, so peaceful protest jibes with her beliefs. And she decided to immerse herself in the protests after getting to know the folk there and deciding that most of them are righteous.
Yes, she is proud of him, she told me. But no, it's not easy to see your kid live in a tent, and even harder to see him hauled off to jail.
She walked over to the police officers to tell them her son had been arrested and 'Hi, I'm Annie' and to just thank them - ahead of time - for treating the arrestees well.
All she got was a stone face from the cops. Deadpan.
That's okay. Any parent is used to that face, right?
THE WASHINGTON POST
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Let the Kids Play: They’ll Do Better in School
rst Lady Michelle Obama may be on to something with her unflagging “Let’s Move” admonitions — the latest research shows that physical activity may help children do better in school.
Amika Singh, a senior researcher at VU University in the Netherlands, reports in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine that physical activity is associated with better academic performance, as measured by higher GPAs and better scores on standardized tests. She and her colleagues reviewed 14 studies, some of which simply recorded the amount of physical activity that children, parents or teachers reported that youngsters got over three days to seven days prior to the study, and some of which randomly assigned students to varying amounts of exercise a day. Taken together, the studies showed that the more physical activity the children had, the higher their scores in school, particularly in the basic subjects of math, English and reading.
The data support earlier research that linked exercise with more productivity and fewer sick days for adults, and could fuel the ongoing debate over whether physical education classes should be cut from school programs due to budget constraints. According to the Centers for Disease Control, students should have about one hour of physical activity every day to remain healthy; only 18% of high school students met this requirement in the week prior to a 2009 survey and 23% had not exercised at all during that period. The argument for reducing the amount of school time devoted to physical education is based on the fact that standardized test scores for US children have been dropping in recent years, and some administrators believe gym time can be better used to boost academic performance.
But Singh and her team show that rather than impairing school performance, physical activity may actually improve grades, which could help to retain gym programs throughout the nation. The studies considered physical activity as any exercise children received from either school-based physical education classes or organized sports both inside and outside of school. Being more active, says Singh, may improve blood flow to the brain, which provides more oxygen to cells involved in learning and attention. Exercise also boosts levels of certain hormones that can improve mood and fight stress, both of which can also provide a better learning environment for children.
Singh says that the benefits of physical activity may extend beyond academic performance, however. “Children learn by participating in sports, learning rules, and learning to act appropriately in a social environment,” she says. “And that translates into the classroom, where children who are physically active may adhere better to classroom rules and get along better with teachers and classmates. So academic performance may just be the short term benefit of exercise; there are a whole range of social and behavioral benefits that go beyond grades as well.”
Let the Kids Play: They’ll Do Better in School
Think that physical activity is just good for the body? Turns out exercise can help youngsters do better in school too
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/03/let-the-kids-play-theyll-do-better-in-school/#ixzz1iTO2iLUN
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/03/let-the-kids-play-theyll-do-better-in-school/#ixzz1iTNrRd28
One limitation of the analysis, however, is the fact that Singh deemed only two of the 14 studies as being high quality, meaning that the studies were set up in such as way that the both physical activity levels and academic performance were measured in a reliably objective way. Some of the studies depended on either the students or parents and teachers recalling how much exercise the children got over a certain period, and these surveys are always subject to bias.
Still, the findings hint that getting active may have long term benefits not just for the body, but for the brain as well. And the physical activity doesn’t have to occur in a single bout of hour-long exercise. Shorter periods of activity that break up the hours-long school day may be just as effective as a single session, and may make it easier to work in physical education into school curricula.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/03/let-the-kids-play-theyll-do-better-in-school/#ixzz1iTNmy3mm
Amika Singh, a senior researcher at VU University in the Netherlands, reports in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine that physical activity is associated with better academic performance, as measured by higher GPAs and better scores on standardized tests. She and her colleagues reviewed 14 studies, some of which simply recorded the amount of physical activity that children, parents or teachers reported that youngsters got over three days to seven days prior to the study, and some of which randomly assigned students to varying amounts of exercise a day. Taken together, the studies showed that the more physical activity the children had, the higher their scores in school, particularly in the basic subjects of math, English and reading.
The data support earlier research that linked exercise with more productivity and fewer sick days for adults, and could fuel the ongoing debate over whether physical education classes should be cut from school programs due to budget constraints. According to the Centers for Disease Control, students should have about one hour of physical activity every day to remain healthy; only 18% of high school students met this requirement in the week prior to a 2009 survey and 23% had not exercised at all during that period. The argument for reducing the amount of school time devoted to physical education is based on the fact that standardized test scores for US children have been dropping in recent years, and some administrators believe gym time can be better used to boost academic performance.
But Singh and her team show that rather than impairing school performance, physical activity may actually improve grades, which could help to retain gym programs throughout the nation. The studies considered physical activity as any exercise children received from either school-based physical education classes or organized sports both inside and outside of school. Being more active, says Singh, may improve blood flow to the brain, which provides more oxygen to cells involved in learning and attention. Exercise also boosts levels of certain hormones that can improve mood and fight stress, both of which can also provide a better learning environment for children.
Singh says that the benefits of physical activity may extend beyond academic performance, however. “Children learn by participating in sports, learning rules, and learning to act appropriately in a social environment,” she says. “And that translates into the classroom, where children who are physically active may adhere better to classroom rules and get along better with teachers and classmates. So academic performance may just be the short term benefit of exercise; there are a whole range of social and behavioral benefits that go beyond grades as well.”
Let the Kids Play: They’ll Do Better in School
Think that physical activity is just good for the body? Turns out exercise can help youngsters do better in school too
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/03/let-the-kids-play-theyll-do-better-in-school/#ixzz1iTO2iLUN
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/03/let-the-kids-play-theyll-do-better-in-school/#ixzz1iTNrRd28
One limitation of the analysis, however, is the fact that Singh deemed only two of the 14 studies as being high quality, meaning that the studies were set up in such as way that the both physical activity levels and academic performance were measured in a reliably objective way. Some of the studies depended on either the students or parents and teachers recalling how much exercise the children got over a certain period, and these surveys are always subject to bias.
Still, the findings hint that getting active may have long term benefits not just for the body, but for the brain as well. And the physical activity doesn’t have to occur in a single bout of hour-long exercise. Shorter periods of activity that break up the hours-long school day may be just as effective as a single session, and may make it easier to work in physical education into school curricula.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/03/let-the-kids-play-theyll-do-better-in-school/#ixzz1iTNmy3mm
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Building character in the classroom
The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on Sep 26, 2011
Editorial
LAST week, Education Minister Heng Swee Keat announced the introduction of a new Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) curriculum which will promote a 'student-centric, values-driven education'. He cited an ageing population, more educated parents and the breakdown of traditional social structures as factors which call for the country's young to have a solid foundation in values and what it means to be a Singaporean. While Civics and Moral Education classes exist currently, the CCE will pull together the disparate modules under one dedicated unit in the Education Ministry.
This move certainly marks a change for Singapore's education system, which has always tended to emphasise quantifiables over qualitative factors. Grades, ranking and streaming have dominated the landscape for a long time. Certainly, they have gone a long way towards making Singapore's education system one of the best in the world - so much so that many have taken them for granted.
By default, the remarkable financial progress that Singapore has seen in the last few decades has also contributed to an unhealthy focus on materialism. Many have lamented the lack of compassion and of public spiritedness, and the unhealthy focus on individual success. What Mr Heng is calling for in the school curriculum therefore, is a nationwide reminder of the basic principles which have made this small nation great.
Ironically, Singapore's success and increased affluence have also led to a generation of coddled children who may not have had to learn the hard lessons of struggle. Indulgent parents who constantly shield their children from suffering or criticism inadvertently prevent them from developing emotional strength and character.
It is oft said that values are caught, not taught. Teaching true grit, therefore, will be much harder than improving academic excellence. It calls for a revolutionary approach and visionary educators who must be given some flexibility to implement their ideas. They might find some worthwhile lessons in the experiments of David Levin, the superintendent of the KIPP schools in New York City, who successfully implemented a values programme and grading system in his schools, which were documented in a recent New York Times article by Paul Tough called What If The Secret To Success Is Failure?
The title of the article says it all. Recalibrating the education system towards values requires a leap of faith and a willingness to fail. It remains to be seen if Singapore can rise up to this challenge.
Copyright © 2011 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Homing in on homework
Many say children's workloads should be made more manageable
By Leow Si Wan & Cheryl Ong
HOUSEWIFE Christine Tan's son spends two hours on homework and online assignments daily - and he is all of seven years old and in Primary 1.
She said of her other son, who is in Primary 4 and attends the same school as his younger brother: 'He spent most of the June holidays doing more than 50 multiple-choice questions for each of his subjects.'
The 45-year-old mum said she supports Education Minister Heng Swee Keat's call for schools to establish a policy on homework.
Mr Heng had urged this of schools at his ministry's workplan seminar last week, saying that schools should look into their students' needs and ascertain the amount of homework to be given at the different levels.
This way, parents can have clearer expectations about this longstanding bone of contention.
Madam Tan is not alone.
About half the 20 parents interviewed by The Straits Times expressed concerns that their children were given too much homework.
While most of those with children in the lower primary levels said they felt the amount should be more manageable, they also expressed worry that the step-up in workload may be too sudden when their children move into the upper primary levels.
Madam Lilis Sim, 39, is one parent who called on schools to calibrate the rate at which homework is increased as the pupils move to higher levels. Her son in Primary 5 became very stressed when he was suddenly given much more homework this year, she said.
Parents also raised the issue of the tight deadlines their children are given to complete assignments.
Madam Tan said: 'Sometimes, teachers give a piece of project work and want children to hand it up the next day. Parents end up doing the work. There are also parents who get tutors to help out.'
Pre-school teacher Serina Cheah, 43, said she hoped that schools would distribute the amount of homework fairly over the course of a week.
She noted that her Primary 5 son has none on some days, but on others, he would be snowed under with half a dozen assignments, all due the next day.
And some of these seem to be pitched above his level as well, she said. 'Some questions are so tough that parents ask one another to find answers. Other questions seem to only test exam techniques, so what are we teaching our children?'
Other parents, such as housewife Selena Kaur, 43, whose daughter is in Primary 3, also want schools to keep to a reasonable homework structure to guard against the children being burnt out.
'The kids are young and tire easily. They don't have time for other interests or to develop other talents,' she said.
Educators interviewed noted that the benchmark for what makes for a suitable amount of homework is subjective.
South View Primary principal Jenny Yeo said: 'In the same class, you can have parents saying different things; one might say 'Too much homework', another might say 'Too little', and some parents add to the workload by sending their children for tuition.'
Some schools are already monitoring the workload of pupils, even before Mr Heng's call for a homework policy.
In South View Primary, teachers note down the homework given for the day, either in a book or on the whiteboard, so the class's other teachers will know how much pupils already have on their plate.
Counsellors say homework stress is one of the most common complaints among schoolchildren here.
Ms Goh Li Shan, a coordinator of Tinkle Friend, a hotline for troubled primary schoolchildren, said the helpline receives more than 500 calls a year about homework- and exam-related stress. This makes up 15 per cent of calls in a year.
Counsellor Raymond Cheong, who runs the Children/Youth Learning & Counselling Clinic, said it is better for children to gain knowledge progressively.
He said: 'Children develop their cognitive abilities in stages. It's important that we nurture in them a desire to learn.'
He said, however, that it is hard to pin down the 'right' amount of homework, as it depends on what the child requires. Balance is important, he said.
'Schools must change their mindset and stop focusing too much on achievements. Children may be good at doing homework, but suffer in other areas such as social skills or aesthetics,' he said.
Corporate trainer Jerry Tan, a father of two girls, one in Primary 2 and the other in Secondary 4, also sees the need for balance when it comes to homework.
He said: 'Homework is not a bad thing. Hard work counts towards success, but we should also remember the well-being of a child. Having so much homework to do that they lose out on their childhood is going too far.'
siwan@sph.com.sg
ongyiern@sph.com.sg
Copyright © 2011 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.
Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone
Sunday, Sep. 25, 2011
By Amanda Ripley / Seoul
On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.
In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators. (See pictures of Seoul, the world's most connected city.)
The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul's Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. "There was no place to hide," Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. "I told them, 'It's the hagwon that's in violation, not you. You can go home.'"
Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. "We don't leave at 10 p.m. sharp," he explains. "We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses." Finally, we pile into a silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul's busiest hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin' Donuts and the Kraze Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.
At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit's female member knocks on the door. "Hello? Hello!" she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, "Just a minute!" The inspectors glance at one another. "Just a minute" is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins. (Read about South Korean schools going paperless.)
South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.
But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. Before toothbrushes or printing presses, there were civil service exams that could make or break you. Chinese families have been hiring test-prep tutors since the 7th century. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."
In Seoul, legions of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. At the prestigious Daesung Institute, admission is based (diabolically enough) on students' test scores. Only 14% of applicants are accepted. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nation's top three universities. (Read "Asia's Latest Miracle.")
From a distance, South Korea's results look enviable. Its students consistently outperform their counterparts in almost every country in reading and math. In the U.S., Barack Obama and his Education Secretary speak glowingly of the enthusiasm South Korean parents have for educating their children, and they lament how far U.S. students are falling behind. Without its education obsession, South Korea could not have transformed into the economic powerhouse that it is today. (Since 1962 the nation's GDP has gone up about 40,000%, making it the world's 13th largest economy.) But the country's leaders worry that unless its rigid, hierarchical system starts to nurture more innovation, economic growth will stall — and fertility rates will continue to decline as families feel the pressure of paying for all that tutoring. "You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system," Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, "but Koreans are not happy with it."
South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.
The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.
See 10 things to do in Seoul.
Koreans have lamented their relative inefficiency for years, and the government has repeatedly tried to humanize the education system — simplifying admissions tests, capping hagwon tuition, even going so far as to ban hagwons altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under a dictatorship. But after each attempt, the hagwons come back stronger. That's because the incentives remain unchanged. South Korean kids gorge themselves on studying for one reason: to get into one of the country's top universities. The slots are too few — and the reward for getting in too great. "Where you attend university haunts you for the rest of your life," says Lee Beom, a former cram-school instructor who now works on reform in the Seoul metropolitan office of education.
But this time, the administration argues, its reforms are targeting not just the symptom of the dysfunction but also the causes. It is working to improve normal public schools by putting teachers and principals through rigorous evaluations — which include opinion surveys by students, parents and peer teachers — and requiring additional training for low-scoring teachers. At the same time, the government hopes to reduce the strain on students. Corporal punishment, an entrenched and formalized ritual in South Korean schools, is now prohibited (although students told me it still happens occasionally). Admissions tests for prestigious, specialized high schools (like foreign-language schools) have been eliminated. Middle schoolers are now judged on the basis of their regular grades and an interview. And 500 admissions officers have been appointed to the country's universities, to judge applicants not only on their test scores and grades but also other abilities. (Read "Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?")
The Parent Trap
No one defends the status quo in South Korea. "All we do is study, except when we sleep," one high school boy told me, and he was not exaggerating. The typical academic schedule begins at 8 a.m. and ends sometime from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the ambition of the student. To be sure, some students opt out of this system — those who go to certain vocational high schools, for example. But most cannot transcend the relentless family and peer pressure to study until they drop from fatigue. "It breaks my heart," another teenage boy tells me, "to see my classmates compete against each other instead of helping each other."
Parents remain the real drivers of the education rat race, and they will be the hardest to convert. Han Yoon-hee, an English teacher at Jeong Bal High School in Ilsan, a suburb of Seoul, says parental anxiety is profound. "I suggest to [my students] that they should quit hagwons and focus on school," she says. "But their parents get very nervous when they don't take classes at night. They know other students are taking classes. They have to compete with each other."
Sometimes it's hard to know who is competing with whom — the students or their mothers. In 1964 a school entrance exam contained a question about the ingredients in taffy. But the exam inadvertently included two right answers, only one of which was counted as correct. To protest this unfairness, outraged mothers — not students — began cooking taffy outside government offices using the alternative ingredient. Eventually, the mothers won the resignation of the Vice Education Minister and the superintendent of Seoul, and several dozen students received retroactive admission offers.
Still, the Education Ministry can point to one recent victory in this long fight: spending on private instruction decreased 3.5% in 2010, the first drop since the government began tracking the figure in 2007. Does the decline signal a trend? Well, Koreans still spent 2% of their GDP on tutoring, even with the downtick. Andrew Kim, a very successful instructor at Megastudy, South Korea's largest hagwon, says he earned $4 million last year from online and in-person lectures. He agrees that the system is far from ideal, but so far he has seen no impact from the reforms on his income. "The tougher the measures," he says, "the more resilient hagwons become." In response to the government-imposed curfew, for example, many hagwons have just put more lessons online for students to buy after hours at home. (See TIME's special report on what makes a school great.)
Other hagwons flout the law, continuing to operate past the curfew — sometimes in disguise. The night of the Daechi-dong raid, the inspectors I am following wait for the door to open. Then they take off their shoes and begin a brisk tour of the place. In a warren of small study rooms with low ceilings and fluorescent lights, about 40 teenagers sit at small, individual carrels. The air is stale. It is a disturbing scene, sort of like a sweatshop for children's brains.
This is technically not a hagwon but an after-hours self-study library — at least in theory. Self-study libraries are allowed to stay open past 10 p.m. But the inspectors suspect this is a camouflaged hagwon. The students are studying from the same work sheets, and there are a handful of adults who appear to be teachers.
One of them denies any wrongdoing. "We are just doing our own work here," she says indignantly. "We don't teach." Cha, the squad leader, shakes his head. "I've allowed your excuses before, but we're getting too many tips about this place," he says. "It's an open secret in this community that you've been operating illegally."
Afterward, the squad makes a few more stops at other self-study libraries. It finds nothing suspicious. At about midnight, Cha lights a cigarette on a corner and chats with his colleagues. Then they head home for the night, having temporarily liberated 40 teenagers out of 4 million.
— with reporting by Stephen Kim / Seoul
Ripley is an Emerson fellow at the New America Foundation
This article originally appeared in the October 3, 2011 issue of TIME Asia
By Amanda Ripley / Seoul
On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.
In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators. (See pictures of Seoul, the world's most connected city.)
The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul's Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. "There was no place to hide," Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. "I told them, 'It's the hagwon that's in violation, not you. You can go home.'"
Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. "We don't leave at 10 p.m. sharp," he explains. "We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses." Finally, we pile into a silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul's busiest hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin' Donuts and the Kraze Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.
At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit's female member knocks on the door. "Hello? Hello!" she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, "Just a minute!" The inspectors glance at one another. "Just a minute" is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins. (Read about South Korean schools going paperless.)
South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.
But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. Before toothbrushes or printing presses, there were civil service exams that could make or break you. Chinese families have been hiring test-prep tutors since the 7th century. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."
In Seoul, legions of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. At the prestigious Daesung Institute, admission is based (diabolically enough) on students' test scores. Only 14% of applicants are accepted. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nation's top three universities. (Read "Asia's Latest Miracle.")
From a distance, South Korea's results look enviable. Its students consistently outperform their counterparts in almost every country in reading and math. In the U.S., Barack Obama and his Education Secretary speak glowingly of the enthusiasm South Korean parents have for educating their children, and they lament how far U.S. students are falling behind. Without its education obsession, South Korea could not have transformed into the economic powerhouse that it is today. (Since 1962 the nation's GDP has gone up about 40,000%, making it the world's 13th largest economy.) But the country's leaders worry that unless its rigid, hierarchical system starts to nurture more innovation, economic growth will stall — and fertility rates will continue to decline as families feel the pressure of paying for all that tutoring. "You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system," Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, "but Koreans are not happy with it."
South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.
The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.
See 10 things to do in Seoul.
Koreans have lamented their relative inefficiency for years, and the government has repeatedly tried to humanize the education system — simplifying admissions tests, capping hagwon tuition, even going so far as to ban hagwons altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under a dictatorship. But after each attempt, the hagwons come back stronger. That's because the incentives remain unchanged. South Korean kids gorge themselves on studying for one reason: to get into one of the country's top universities. The slots are too few — and the reward for getting in too great. "Where you attend university haunts you for the rest of your life," says Lee Beom, a former cram-school instructor who now works on reform in the Seoul metropolitan office of education.
But this time, the administration argues, its reforms are targeting not just the symptom of the dysfunction but also the causes. It is working to improve normal public schools by putting teachers and principals through rigorous evaluations — which include opinion surveys by students, parents and peer teachers — and requiring additional training for low-scoring teachers. At the same time, the government hopes to reduce the strain on students. Corporal punishment, an entrenched and formalized ritual in South Korean schools, is now prohibited (although students told me it still happens occasionally). Admissions tests for prestigious, specialized high schools (like foreign-language schools) have been eliminated. Middle schoolers are now judged on the basis of their regular grades and an interview. And 500 admissions officers have been appointed to the country's universities, to judge applicants not only on their test scores and grades but also other abilities. (Read "Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?")
The Parent Trap
No one defends the status quo in South Korea. "All we do is study, except when we sleep," one high school boy told me, and he was not exaggerating. The typical academic schedule begins at 8 a.m. and ends sometime from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the ambition of the student. To be sure, some students opt out of this system — those who go to certain vocational high schools, for example. But most cannot transcend the relentless family and peer pressure to study until they drop from fatigue. "It breaks my heart," another teenage boy tells me, "to see my classmates compete against each other instead of helping each other."
Parents remain the real drivers of the education rat race, and they will be the hardest to convert. Han Yoon-hee, an English teacher at Jeong Bal High School in Ilsan, a suburb of Seoul, says parental anxiety is profound. "I suggest to [my students] that they should quit hagwons and focus on school," she says. "But their parents get very nervous when they don't take classes at night. They know other students are taking classes. They have to compete with each other."
Sometimes it's hard to know who is competing with whom — the students or their mothers. In 1964 a school entrance exam contained a question about the ingredients in taffy. But the exam inadvertently included two right answers, only one of which was counted as correct. To protest this unfairness, outraged mothers — not students — began cooking taffy outside government offices using the alternative ingredient. Eventually, the mothers won the resignation of the Vice Education Minister and the superintendent of Seoul, and several dozen students received retroactive admission offers.
Still, the Education Ministry can point to one recent victory in this long fight: spending on private instruction decreased 3.5% in 2010, the first drop since the government began tracking the figure in 2007. Does the decline signal a trend? Well, Koreans still spent 2% of their GDP on tutoring, even with the downtick. Andrew Kim, a very successful instructor at Megastudy, South Korea's largest hagwon, says he earned $4 million last year from online and in-person lectures. He agrees that the system is far from ideal, but so far he has seen no impact from the reforms on his income. "The tougher the measures," he says, "the more resilient hagwons become." In response to the government-imposed curfew, for example, many hagwons have just put more lessons online for students to buy after hours at home. (See TIME's special report on what makes a school great.)
Other hagwons flout the law, continuing to operate past the curfew — sometimes in disguise. The night of the Daechi-dong raid, the inspectors I am following wait for the door to open. Then they take off their shoes and begin a brisk tour of the place. In a warren of small study rooms with low ceilings and fluorescent lights, about 40 teenagers sit at small, individual carrels. The air is stale. It is a disturbing scene, sort of like a sweatshop for children's brains.
This is technically not a hagwon but an after-hours self-study library — at least in theory. Self-study libraries are allowed to stay open past 10 p.m. But the inspectors suspect this is a camouflaged hagwon. The students are studying from the same work sheets, and there are a handful of adults who appear to be teachers.
One of them denies any wrongdoing. "We are just doing our own work here," she says indignantly. "We don't teach." Cha, the squad leader, shakes his head. "I've allowed your excuses before, but we're getting too many tips about this place," he says. "It's an open secret in this community that you've been operating illegally."
Afterward, the squad makes a few more stops at other self-study libraries. It finds nothing suspicious. At about midnight, Cha lights a cigarette on a corner and chats with his colleagues. Then they head home for the night, having temporarily liberated 40 teenagers out of 4 million.
— with reporting by Stephen Kim / Seoul
Ripley is an Emerson fellow at the New America Foundation
This article originally appeared in the October 3, 2011 issue of TIME Asia
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