Description

In both within and outside South Korea, Korean education has increasingly faced severe criticisms on its traditionally standardized and centralized educational system which is accused of failing to provide individualized educational opportunities and thus to nurture creativity of students: 1) Korean schools make talented students mediocre; and 2) Korean students are deprived of creativity at the expense of good scores on academic achievement tests. These critical perspectives have motivated recent educational reforms within Korea toward more differentiated and individualized educational opportunities. In this study, I assess the validity of these (and other) typical criticisms on Korean education on the basis of empirical evidence from international surveys of student achievement. The findings show that many of those critical arguments against Korean education are not consistent with empirical evidence, only perpetuating stereotyped images of Korean education. De-mystifying stereotypes reveals a “real” problem that Korean education is facing in recent educational reforms: growing inequality in student performance.

Hyunjoon Park is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005. He is interested in social and educational stratification in comparative perspective with focus on Korea and other East Asian countries. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has received several awards including Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and Abe Fellowship. Dr. Park has recently published a co-edited volume on globalization and education in East Asia.