Whining on Education

Edit: One more robbery this morning.

Trying to combine many thoughts into something cohesive…

Lately, in the East Bay, there has been a string of armed robberies of restaurants.  They’ve been takeover-style and there have been at least five a dozen of them.  One even happened during a neighborhood march to demonstrate solidarity of merchants against the crimes.  It’s so horrible; like my sister said…restaurants don’t even carry much cash because they do so much business in credit.  Last Friday, there was a fatal shooting at the local mall here.  It was the second fatal shooting this summer for the mall.  The latest was especially crazy; four individuals chased one person across the mall parking lot and into a videogame store and shot him dead right there in the store.  Lots of witnesses, and you know there had to be kids inside the store…it happened in the afternoon and summer vacation ended just today.

I looked up the website for my high school, the one that erected a fence around the entire school to keep students on campus during the school day.  I knew that the principal was retiring; she was my Home Economics teacher back in the day and she’d been there for some time before that.  I was shocked to learn, however, that my high school has three new vice-principals as well!  Four brand new administrators for four spots!!  None of them are staff that worked at the school previously, so it doesn’t seem to bode well for improvements at the school.  Perhaps I’m being hypocritical as someone who taught there for only one year (then again, they did not hire me) but there needs to be constancy of faculty and staff.  What happens when there’s no constancy?  Well, the STAR test scores were released early last week and, unfortunately, Hayward lived up to its poor reputation: only 30% of students proficient in the Grade 10 English and only 19% proficient in the Grade 10 Math.  They are the worst in the district.  Depressing.  This…decline is happening right before our eyes…not just the school, but the city and the area.  The East Bay is still the East Bay and Hayward is still my home, but there are glaring problems that show no sign of improving.

Okay, so my hours of employment in Korea will be 3pm-10pm.  This is because I’m working at an English school where students attend after their normal, comprehensive school.  I’ve learned that students in high school routinely return home from school at 11pm because they all attend the specialized schools.  At first, I was alarmed and dismissive of this idea.  I figured it’s some obsessive and stereotypical Asian practice, drilling rote knowledge into students while suppressing their expression.  But, I realized that the typical Honors student in the U.S. does the same thing.  A good student doesn’t stop his or her learning school lets out at 3pm.  There’s homework and studying to do, maybe music or sports, perhaps college prep class or language class or tutoring.  And it’s entirely plausible that those things could go on until 10 or 11pm.  The difference is that in Korea, this education is sponsored.  The specialized schools are numerous (even if privatized) and the government and society buy into the idea of intense education.  In the U.S., programs are shelved left and right.  Money is unavailable, high achievement is not celebrated and, as a result, parents, teachers and students are resistant to the idea of doing more than the minimum.  There are exceptions, of course, but there can be no argument saying we value education as much as Koreans or pretty much anyone else in the world.  How long would it take to enact a sweeping philosophical change for every American?  Not before your next armed robbery, that’s for certain.