Teachers’ Views of Exam Competition Reflected in TV Drama

Many people react with discomfort at the very idea of viewing education through the lens of market principles. Along with healthcare, education has traditionally been regarded as a domain in which publicness must be emphasized, and in a sense I, too, have devoted my professional life to restoring normalcy to public education. The problem, however, is how much comprehensive publicness is actually being secured in school activities such as classes and counseling, which connect the two central actors in schools today’s classrooms—teachers and students.

Just as Korea’s health insurance system has been criticized for becoming little more than a medical-cost discount scheme for private hospitals, Korean school education is likewise criticized as being little more than a cheaper version of private cram-school lectures and private admissions consulting. More recently, TV dramas have even portrayed the widespread social distrust surrounding the rolling admissions system. What, then, is the cause of these problems in school education, one of the most resource-consuming public sectors in Korea?

In debates over the public-good character of education, contrary to the wishes of those who say, “I will look only at education and have no interest in politics or economics,” the education system cannot be free from political perspectives, philosophies, and strategies. Politics can be viewed narrowly as something limited to particular politicians or political groups, but when one looks at society as a whole, including healthcare and education, it is inseparably tied to fundamental differences in social outlook. There can be many interpretations, but broadly speaking, the left sees the capitalist social system as driving human beings into relations of “oppression” and “exploitation,” and from that standpoint prioritizes the protection of the exploited working class. The right, by contrast, views society through the lens of “choice” in values and “competition” for the enhancement of value, and emphasizes fair and strict rules above all.

In reality, oppression and exploitation arise less from the relationship between capitalists and workers than from a more fundamental human desire to exercise power—a moral problem in most cases, tied to a preference for establishing vertical hierarchy over horizontal mutual respect among individuals. Not only in interactions among adults, but even within school classroom communities, which operate differently from capitalist society, students are constantly exposed to violence based on collectivist power relations, such as outright bullying or social exclusion. Yet pro-socialist perspectives that stress regulating markets and protecting workers or the weak remain globally dominant in academia and education. In Korean society especially, there are not many educators who view admissions competition and the educational-credentials market neutrally as natural economic phenomena.

Until now, Korean students have been seen as victims suffering in “entrance exam hell,” and therefore as people whom society must protect by improving the admissions system. Most teachers, too, are unfamiliar with approaching college admissions from the standpoint of educational market principles. The path Korean education policy has taken over the past 30 years, especially under the banner of reforming the old admissions system centered solely on written examinations, demonstrates this clearly. Terms such as “ideal,” “inclusive,” and “humane” have in fact functioned as powerful alternatives to the right-leaning emphasis on “market principles”—while also being jumbled together with Anglo-American-style university admissions autonomy. As a result, the university admissions system has been left in a state of unpredictable, complex anomie, as much so as real estate tax policy.

Korean society has long turned away from market principles and the market sphere in education. Yet in reality, students have competed in the past, are competing now, and will continue to compete in the future in order to enter universities with “higher social recognition”—that is, better universities. This is simply the existence of an educational-credentials market brought about by the natural desires of individual students. In this respect, the most ironic point in the mismatch between honest students who expect fair competition and well-meaning educators who believe students are being sacrificed in the hellish admissions reality created by adults is the existence of high school teachers who believe their mission is to help “send” more of their students, and more students from their schools, to better universities. One need not look far to see this vividly; the recently concluded TV drama Black Dog depicts exactly this.

In particular, the realistic portrayal of teachers in Black Dog is of high school teachers who say students are suffering in entrance exam hell, yet in fact play as great a role as parents—indeed, with the emotions of parents themselves—in fueling admissions competition. In that sense, the drama reveals one facet of Korean public education, which has itself neglected publicness. For example, in one episode, at a meeting of all the teachers, the head of college counseling, one of the drama’s main characters, passionately discusses the schools’ fundamental problems for “our kids,” and with softly stirring background music the solemn narration says, “Someone among us has to speak this uncomfortable truth.” Yet the “uncomfortable truth” in that episode is ultimately only that the school has failed to send more students to Korea University—the university all students in the drama supposedly want to attend—not the uncomfortable truth or fundamental problem of Korean education itself.

The way the teachers in the drama write students’ school records resembles not the posture of strict judges but that of attorneys standing on the side of their clients. The school in the drama makes grand efforts to invite admissions officers from universities favored by students in order to extract valuable admissions information in preparation for the comprehensive student record screening. This faithfully reflects the social perception that the mission of a high school is to send students to better universities. In Korean society, where it is widely taken for granted that after graduating high school, the next step is naturally college—even if one has little interest in studying—this perception is accepted as very natural. Yet it is doubtful how much school records written by teachers who are desperately trying to get their students into better universities can really serve as objective verification material in college admissions. Moreover, if, as in the drama, classes and assessments are focused on preparing for the CSAT through EBS materials and past exam questions, then despite the Ministry of Education’s pouring astronomical sums into reorganizing curricula and assessment systems around inquiry and critical thinking, how is school education in substance any different from private cram-school instruction?

But an even more fundamental problem than the fair preparation of school records or classes overly tilted toward solving CSAT questions is this: the efforts of teachers like those in the drama—teachers consumed by a sense of mission to send their students to better universities—end up overheating admissions competition among students nationwide beyond what is necessary. To affirm the existence of admissions competition and the education market is one thing; for teachers to intensify nationwide admissions competition beyond necessity—driven, often unconsciously, by their own sense of mission—is an entirely different matter. Just as there is a fundamental contradiction between the political and social attempt to suppress private education at any cost on the grounds that it is bad, and parents’ unwavering desire to send their own children to expensive private academies nonetheless, so too does Korean education display a contradiction in teachers like those in the drama, who pity students pushed into admissions competition while unknowingly participating in the overheating of that very competition.

The publicness of school education, as opposed to the trench-warrior resolve of “I will never give up on my students” seen in Black Dog, may in fact be better preserved through a professional distance grounded in professionalism—one that accepts the education market and says, “I will treat students fairly.” In the drama, there is a scene where the head of college counseling has memorized the grades of one high-performing student at the school, and when that student’s parent makes a noisy, impulsive visit to the school, he calmly responds by showing off his professionalism as head of college counseling. But unless he has memorized the grades of every student in the school, this is something he should not be doing. In reality, there should not be “main-character students” and “extra students.”

The Ministry of Education has continuously restructured college admissions by adopting rolling admissions systems such as the comprehensive student record screening—systems intended to reflect in admissions the growth and effort of students as observed and documented by teachers rigorously, objectively, and professionally. Yet one could also say that this drama clearly shows how high school teachers have arrived at the present day with an essential mindset unchanged from the past: that they must send “our class” and “our school’s” students to better universities.

Korea’s admissions system and high school education must now be approached as the reality of an education market. In understanding human beings and society, competition and choice should not be seen merely as an unfortunate and bleak reality, but accepted as an ideal mechanism through which all individuals in society can obtain the greatest utility when one takes into account defective human nature. More importantly, only when teachers perform the role of strict market administrators between seller (the university) and buyer (the high school student)—particularly in teaching and assessment—and only when students, parents, and universities share confidence in such teachers’ neutrality, can public education, especially high schools that have become little more than admissions institutions, be revived as independent and self-contained educational institutions.

Over the past 30 years of admissions reform, not a single one of the values put forward by education scholars and policymakers as justifications has been achieved; instead, past admissions systems are now billing society for the costs of lost trust and increased uncertainty. No one in this process set out to ruin things out of malice. We must understand the inevitability of the educational-credentials market that students want and that exists for students. And based on that understanding, from the perspective of the student’s whole-person education, the education most urgently required is one that enables students to bear responsibility as independent persons grounded in their own internal moral standards. In other words, before competition, students must become individuals capable of thinking and judging for themselves what value they wish to choose and why they wish to place meaning in that value. This is also the essence of individualism. From this perspective, what is most urgently needed in Korean schools is not hollow slogans emphasizing the qualities of democratic citizenship, but rather the proper self-reliance of individual students and the securing of fairness and trustworthiness in individual teachers.

Baemin Bae, History Teacher, Soongeui Girls’ High School

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Original title: 드라마에 투영된 입시경쟁과 교사의 시각

Author: Bae Min

Date: 2020-03-25

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=15&idx=22510