Continued exaggeration of President Obama's views on Korean education.

President Obama's admiration for Korean education is in the news again, via a Korea Times article "Obama Praises Korean Education Again":

U.S. President Barak Obama has lauded South Korea, again, to encourage Americans to do more on the educational front.

In a speech he delivered in Las Vegas on Friday, he said America cannot succeed in science if India and South Korea produces more scientists and engineers, according to Yonhap News Agency Saturday.

I've written about Obama's "praise" of South Korea's education system three times in the past:

* March 11, 2009: "President Obama likes Korea's education system, sort of."
* March 22, 2009: "Obama didn't say what you thought he said about Korean education."
* December 22, 2009: "Don't worry so much about what President Obama said about Korea's education system."

You'll notice a common theme there, one I'll talk about today, too: the local media exaggerates Obama's compliments, then uses those exaggerations to levy its own criticism of Korea's education system.

Looking at the transcript of the Las Vegas speech, for the exact quotation, since the paper doesn't give it, he said:

If India or South Korea are producing more scientists and engineers than we are, we will not succeed.

That's the only mention of Korea in the 4,000-plus-word speech, hardly enough "praise" to make headlines.

Similarly, the local papers carried news of Obama's lauding of Korean education last spring, after a speech he made in March. The Korea Times wrote on March 11th, "Obama Lauds Korea's Education of Children," and the Chosun Ilbo wrote the next day "Obama Cites Korea for Educational Excellence." (A November 24th Times article is titled "Obama Lauds Korea for Education Zeal.") He did have some nice things to say, sort of, about Korea's school system, though if you look at his actual remarks you wonder how focused he really was on South Korea.

Looking at the transcript of the speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Congress last March, available from the New York Times, we'll see he mentioned Korea twice:

Now, even as we foster innovation in where our children are learning, let's also foster innovation in when our children are learning. We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day. That calendar may have once made sense, but today it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children -- listen to this -- our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea -- every year. That's no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy. That's why I'm calling for us not only to expand effective after-school programs, but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time -– whether during the summer or through expanded-day programs for children who need it. (Applause.)

Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas. (Laughter.) Not with Malia and Sasha -- (laughter) -- not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom. If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America.

I would hardly call that "lauding" or citing Korea for "education excellence." In fact, if I may plagiarize myself a bit from my March 22nd post, the second mention doesn't really look like a compliment at all, but more like somebody roughly saying "some place you don't know or care about is doing this, so of course we can, too!" Not to say Barack Obama doesn't care about South Korea, but the first example reads more like a generic one-off comment than a thoughtful, exhaustive assessment of the Korean public school system.

At the time, however, some in the local English-language media took those exaggerated compliments as an opportunity to criticize Korea's education system, and criticize what they considered Obama's ignorance of the flaws of Korea's system. Indeed it looked like some in the media---a media that is quite hard on Korea's education system---put words in Obama's mouth simply to discredit them for the sake of argument. The March 11th Korea Times piece concluded:

Obama's remarks came as a surprise to many South Koreans as the country's education system has been under constant public criticism due to its lack of creativity and heavy dependence on private tutoring.

Choi Yong-hearn, a Times columnist I've made fun of a few times before, read far too much into Obama's speech in a March 17th piece:

The Korean school system has all kinds of problems. Many Korean people are ashamed of their schools. Many students feel that their schools are ``hell'' even today.

However, President Obama admires South Korea's schools and their products, educated manpower. He praised the Korean students who are competitive among students in advanced nations.

Korean students' performance is known to be superb, especially in the fields of mathematics and science. American teachers are amazed at Korean students' math and science scores. Obama's recent statement is just a reflection of the American people's admiration of Korean schools.

You can revisit the speech yourself to look for evidence of "admiration" on the part of the American people or President Obama. I'll give you the answer: there isn't any.

Here's a March 12th Chosun Ilbo cartoon I've reprinted a couple times. It picks up on one of the president's messages, that American students should spent more time in school, and interprets that as his desire to completely adopt a Korean system:


The two girls are the president's daughters, who he mentioned by name next to South Korea in his speech last March

Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas. (Laughter.) Not with Malia and Sasha -- (laughter) -- not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom. If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America.

and the two Korean students in the cartoon, carrying bags full of books for their many cramschools ("학원가방"), are telling them not to believe everything he says about Korea's education system. Of course, if you go back to his comments, there is nothing to indicate he's interested in forcing his kids into such a Korean system, a system that some might say amounts to child abuse by keeping children away from home, forcing them into cramschools late into the night, depriving them of sleep, and preparing them for little more than regurgitating answers when it's time to sit for standardized tests.

We last heard about President Obama's reported praise for Korean schools in December, when he visited South Korea and met with President Lee Myung-bak. The Korea Herald followed a familiar pattern, taking the opportunity to write about President Lee's "dissatisfaction" with education here:

President Lee Myung-bak yesterday called for more efforts to improve education as disputes are rising over elite high schools and university admission.
He also said he felt sorry to hear U.S. President Barack Obama praise Korea's educational system after their meeting last month.

"I felt sorry ... I am very dissatisfied (with our education)," Lee said during a policy report from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

"There have been many changes but the changes have yet to be stabilized, causing much concern for the people."

CNN.com picked up the story, but for the sake of brevity I won't reprint it here.

That's because I'd like to, instead, look at the worst case of misunderstanding in the local media, an opinion piece from last December by a Korean English teacher in Gwangju. Titled "Dear President Obama," it repeats all the familiar exaggerations and distortions, presents them as the president's own ideas, and seemingly brings them up only to criticize Korea's own education system and the president's apparent ignorance of it. Perhaps he considers himself clever for getting his name in the paper, but the piece merely demonstrates his own ignorance. Read the whole thing; here are a few choice excerpts:

Mr. President, you have often eulogized about Korea's education system.

What would you say, however, if American children were driven into a hell of private tutoring, juggling their time by going to four or five different private institutes for piano, Taekwondo, math, English and writing lessons after school?

. . .

A few weeks ago, I was surprised and pleased to hear that you lauded Korean parents for their enthusiasm for children's education and Korean students for their zeal and perseverance to attain high scores and to enter good high schools and universities, in triggering the campaign of ``Educate to Innovate." What an embarrassment for the President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, to tout the Korean educational system!

The writer's true agenda comes through in this paragraph, which relates in no way to anything the president said, might have said, or remotely considered saying:

Dear President Obama, is it okay if I were to ask you how much you really understand the Korean educational system or the real circumstances surrounding English language classes in Korea? I wonder if you know how many students there are in a typical English classroom in Korea. Do you think it is possible for one teacher to effectively teach one-to-one interaction for the purpose of learning communicative competence with more than forty students in a class? Do you realize that Koreans are some of the poorest in the world at effectively communicating in English even though they are exposed to English classes for more than 10 years during their elementary and secondary school education? Do you know why Koreans are so poor at English speaking? I wonder if you know that Korea has had no Nobel Prize laureates in science till now.

The writer, Choi Tae-hwan, is one who rebutted one of my first appearances in the Korea Times back in 2006, though he got my name wrong while doing it. It would be very enjoyable to take Choi to task for his tangential points, but that's beyond the scope of this post. The point is, if these reporters and writers actually took a look at the president's remarks on Korea, we'd have a lot fewer headlines lauding this and citing that. And you wouldn't have people like Choi Tae-hwan writing stupid shit like this for their own ends:

Mr. President! Is it true that you consider Korea to be a good role model for American educational innovation? Do you really want American foreign language classrooms to be jammed with more than 40 students? Are you willing to spend a great deal of money on your children's private tutoring for many hours every day? Do you hope American students will be trained to be exam machines for high scores through sacrificing their creativity and humanity?

Now where the fuck did he say or imply "I hope American students will be trained to be exam machines for high scores through sacrificing their creativity and humanity"?

You'll excuse me for flying off the handle with Choi, but there's no sense in continuing to be so intentionally misinformed about President Obama's opinion of Korean education. It's time for Koreans to acknowledge the strengths of their education system---and indeed they do exist---without taking any compliment of it to mean a desire to take things to extremes the way South Koreans tend to do. It's also time for those in the local media to approach a discussion of Obama and Korean education with sophistication, and not as an opportunity to criticize Korean schools or Obama's perceived ignorance of them.