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Friday, August 30, 2019
Posting on Reading Essay
Education            How education is valued and how it is tied up with culture and the structure of society is the focus of the article. Moreover, several factors that encourage people to attend higher education are also explored in the article. For instance, several examples about the South Korean culture were revealed in the article in order to emphasize how the view of education changes depending on the culture. For the South Koreans, education is seen as a status symbol and not a stepping-stone to acquire a job in the future. The good thing about it though is that statistics has shown that the percentage of dropouts is less in areas that believe in the relationship between education and societal value.            People from different walks of life have varying points of view regarding education. A survey conducted in order to determine the reasons why people choose to attend higher education reveals that reputation or culture and the enhancement of an individual’s disposition are the topmost reasons why people value their education. At this point, people view the learning and understanding of the English language as an instrumental skill in order to accomplish an individual’s aims to gain a high and respectable social status. Koreans nowadays are struggling to learn the English language, as it gives one a high rank in the social climate. Koreans spend time and effort in studying English that they are willing to undergo rigorous testing just to speak English well.            Perhaps, the article does not only discuss education as part of culture. I think the issues in this article also have strong connections with globalization. As the world moves to become a global village, people are forced to increase their chances of belonging to the international community. This objective shall only be accomplished through further education. This is probably one of the reasons why education is seen as a form of earning a high rank in society because being well educated and learning to speak English well keeps you in a range of belongingness with the rest of the global community. The Costs of Educational Zeal            The article explores the effects of Korea’s valuing of education to the costs of attending the educational institution. Apparently, with the Korean’s growing value for education and the educational institution’s goals to enhance the quality of education, the costs of higher educations have also reached a high. The reasons underlying the high cost of education in the country was explored under different regimes. The influence of colonialism to the educational system of the country contributed much to the high cost that they require of education. Moreover, majority of educational institutions in the country require expensive rates for their services because most of them are privately owned. At this point, I ask myself, why do they need to pay expensive taxes for education when most of the educational institutions are private?            There was not any change during the Park Chung Hee’s term as president of the country. During this time, education was neglected, therefore there were no efforts coming from the government to fix the problem expensive costs of education. Reflecting on it, education in the country has really become a social status, such that only those who can afford it are able to gain the quality education that they deserve. Moreover, the government does not care less whether the people are able to afford education. This reveals how the voices of those people who cannot afford to attend educational institutions are not being heard.            Another factor that influenced the high costs of education was what the people called Kwaoe. Kwaoe is the Korean term for tutoring. This service requires large amounts of money that people cannot help but complain about its cost. At this point of time, the government was able to address this issue and ban tutoring all over the country. Throughout the years, noticeable efforts to alleviate the rising cost of education were evident when reviewing the performances of past governments. However, their efforts were not enough to lessen the cost of paying for an individual’s education. The failure of governments to remodel their educational system is understandable, because from the beginning, the faulty budgeting and financing for educational institutions was adapted by the country. What the country needs to work on is modifying the educational system in order to identify its flaws and once and for all end the high costs of education.
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