Alternative School - South Korea

South Korea

In South Korea, alternative schools serve three big groups of youth in South Korea. The first group is students who could not succeed in formative Korean education. Many of these schools serve students who dropped out during their earlier school years, either voluntarily or by disciplinary action. Second group is young immigrants. As population of immigrants from Southeast Asia and North Korea is increasing, several educators started to see the necessity of the adaptive education, specially designed for these young immigrants. Because South Korea has been a monoethnic society throughout its history, there is not enough system and awareness to protect these students from bullying, social isolation, or academic failure. For instance, the drop-out rate for North Korean immigrant students is 10 times higher than that of South Korean students, because their major challenge is initially to adapt Korean society, not to get a higher test score. The other group is students who choose an alternative education because of its philosophy. Korean education, as in many other Asian countries, is based on testing and memorizing. Some students and parents believe this kind of education cannot nurture a student thoroughly, and choose to go to an alternative school, that suggests a different way to learn for students. These schools usually stress the importance of interaction between other people and nature over written test results.

The major struggle in alternative schools in South Korea are recognition, lack of financial support, and quality gap between alternative schools. Although South Korean public's recognition to alternative education has deliberately changed, the progressive education still is not widely accepted. To enter a college, regular education is often preferred, often due to the nation's rigid educational taste on test result and record. For the same reason, South Korean government is not actively supporting alternative schools financially. Hence, many alternative schools are at risk of bankruptcy, especially the schools that do not (preferably cannot) collect tuition from their students. Most Southeast Asian and North Korean immigrant families are financially in-need, so that they need assist from government's welfare system for their everyday life. It is clear that affording private education is a mere fantasy for these families. This phenomenon, at last, causes a gap among alternative schools themselves. Some schools are richly supported by upper-class parents and provide variety of in-school and after-school programs, while others rarely have resource to build few academic and extra-curricular programs as such.