The recent success of foreign
students at American universities is stirring unrest among
the upper crust in the U.S. Why are these children scoring
so much higher than our children, even those in
elite American prep schools? The following report has some
of the answers. I include it here not
as an endorsement of the practices described but as a means
of enlightenment, along with these questions: Is this what
we really want from childhood? Is childhood meant
to end at age 13 or is this a return to the
Middle Ages' version of childhood?
New York Times education writer
Sam Dillon visited two of South Korea's
prestigious prep schools to see what is
behind their success in gaining student acceptance at
elite American Ivy schools. What he found would give
most American parents pause. The price for such "acceptance" is
the forfeiture of family and social ties during much of
the students' adolescence. Here is a synopsis of the Dillon
article. The complete piece can be found at:
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/world/asia/27seoul.html.
Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League
Skills
By Sam Dillon , The
New York Times,
Page 1, April 27, 2008
SEOUL, South Korea — It is
10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school
here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour
school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill
can keep them awake. One teenager studies standing upright
at his desk to keep from dozing.
Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores
on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry
and history exams.
“I can’t let myself waste
even a second,” said
Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another
brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This
spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133
graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who
applied to selective American universities won admission.
“Going to U.S. universities has
become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League
names — Harvard,
Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said
Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard
last June.
Daewon has one major Korean rival, the
Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east
of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission
to Ivy League colleges.
How do they do it? Their formula
is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring
middle school students, put those who aspire to an American
university in English-language classes, taught by Korean
and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize
composition and other skills crucial to success on the
SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially
this — urge
them on to unceasing study.
Daewon is ending its school
day earlier for freshmen. Its founder, Lee Won-hee, worried
in an interview that while Daewon was turning out high-scoring
students, it might be falling short in educating them as
responsible citizens.
Their academic year is more than a
month longer than at American high schools.
And, oh yes. Both schools suppress teenage romance as a
waste of time.
“What are you doing holding hands?” a Daewon
administrator scolded an adolescent couple recently, according
to his aides. “You should be studying!”
“Even my worst students are great,” said
Joseph Foster, a Williams College graduate who teaches
writing at Daewon. “They’re professionals;
if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get e-mails
at 2 a.m. I’ll
respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a
follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.”
“I feel proud that I’ve endured
another day,” she said.
South Korea’s
academic year starts in March, so the 2008 class of Daewon’s
Global Leadership Program, which prepares students for
study at foreign universities, graduated in February.
One
graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton
this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors,
lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s
father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee.
Ms.
Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother
scold her older sister for receiving any score less than
100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing.
“Most Korean mothers want their
children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms.
Kim’s
mother said.
Even while at Daewon, Ms. Kim, like thousands
of Korean students, took weekend classes in English, physics
and other subjects at private academies, raising her SAT
scores by hundreds of points. “I just love to do
well on the tests,” she said.
As bright as she is,
she was just one great student among many, said Eric Cho,
Daewon’s college counselor.
Sitting at his computer terminal at the school, perched
on a craggy eastern hilltop overlooking the Seoul skyline,
Mr. Cho scrolled through the class of 2008’s academic
records.
Their average combined SAT score was
2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the average combined score
at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school,
is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math
scores.
Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s
on the SAT verbal and math tests, and 790 in writing. So
she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school
bus at 6:50. Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help
classmates clean her classroom. Between 8 and noon, she
hears Korean instructors teach supply and demand in economics,
Korean soils in geography and classical poets in Korean
literature.
Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She
piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare
at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over
seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours
later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and
water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At
10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will
wend its way through Seoul’s towering high-rise canyons
to her home, south of the Han River.
“I feel proud that I’ve endured
another day,” she
said.
The schedule at the Minjok academy, on
a rural campus of tile-roofed buildings in forested hills,
appears even more daunting. Students rise at 6 for martial
arts, and thereafter, wearing full-sleeved, gray-and-black
robes, plunge into a day of relentless study that ends
just before midnight, when they may sleep.
But most keep
cramming until 2 a.m., when dorm lights are switched off,
said Gang Min-ho, a senior. Even then some students turn
on lanterns and keep going, Mr. Gang said. “Basically
we lead very tired lives,” he said. |