In between private and public education

 

 Private education has become increasingly important in these days. The essential goal of education is said to make the range of children's knowledge wide and help them shape their future ‘on their power’. The purpose of education, however, has been changing. The problem is that education has become blind means of getting into prestigious university. Parents question the method of self-learning, helps the students bear fruit later with sequential steps of learning, and then push their children into private education world, which creates all sorts of problems.

 

 Private education reaches farther to the younger age, now even to the elementary schoolers. In one elementary school in Seoul, in fact, the top 10% of students spend four times as much on private education as the bottom 10% of students, showing the excessive cost of private education. This has also led to a large gap in academic achievement.

 

 As the cost of private education rises, both parents and students are facing increasing pressure to pay for education. In a famous academy street in Seoul, parents line up at dawn to receive admission counseling, and these activities have created a society where the education field is overheated and fierce competition. In response to these expectations and pressures, students are forced to attend academies enrolled by their parents without their will, and in fact, high school students in Gyeonggi study for an average of more than 15 hours a day. They also complain excessive stress because of spending their half of study time to private education.

 

 To press these problems, people are engaging in various activities. For example, a contest called "Best Practices for Educating Children Without Private Education" is being organized to inform various examples of successful study methods without private education and to promote self-learning. The final goal of the contest is to persuade people who know the negative effects of private education but can't put it down so that they can see real-life examples of people who have been in a similar situation to them. Finally, they have gained learning benefits with self-learning methods when they escape from private education field.

 

 The problem of 'private education' is not only a Korean problem, but also an international problem. Therefore, we need to find solutions and find ways to complement and coexist with private education instead of only looking at it in negative sight.

 

 Regardless of the process of studying, you should be the main core of your studying. I don't think there's anything wrong with private education, or with relying on other people to help you learn, as long as you're willing to take part in the process and learn on your own. Therefore, rather than eliminating private education altogether, I think we should create policies that allow self-learning and private education to coexist together by adjusting the necessary parts of the self-learning study process so that private education can fill in the gaps.

 

 

By Staff Reporter Lee Yueun (2-1)