[Student Reporters] Are You Really Coming to Teach? How to keep those who aren‘t out.

Jeong Hoon Lee / <11th, Daewon Foreign Language High School>

My middle school hired its first foreigner when I was in eighth grade. The whole school was hyped about having him come teach. Most expected him to be great. But fact was, he didn’t know what he was doing. As time wore on and he began realizing the students didn‘t understand the bulk of what he was trying to teach, he ended up handing out crossword puzzles for us to fill out in class. While the students were busy filling out the boxes, he would sit in the front of the classroom doing nothing.

Then, this summer I went to one of the few big rock concerts held in Korea. The majority of the foreigners who came were English teachers working at schools or private institutes. My friends and I were able to overhear a lot of what they were saying, considering most of them were drunk and talking at the top of their voices. Their conversations were mostly about their jobs and how it was a piece of cake. By the looks of it, most of them barely knew about the English language, never mind teaching it. But they joked about how easy it was to get a fat paycheck by speaking a few words in English. This got me thinking: is Korea’s English education industry really this messed up?

Turns out, it is. Educational institutes, commonly known as hakwons, hire most of the white Canadian/American college grads who turn up for job applications, sometimes without even completing a decent background check for criminal records and fraud diplomas. This lack of employer censoring is one reason why so much news about foreign English teachers molesting their students or being former convicts get air time.

And although regulations have been set by the government in an effort to screen unqualified foreigners from getting teaching positions beforehand, much of the private industry is taking little notice. The number of drug addicted English teachers and students in South Korea is on the rise, according to the Supreme Public Prosecutor‘s Office, and cases of foreign teachers coming into class under the influence has become more and more common.

However, this just might be the nature of the industry. Joseph Foster, currently working as an English teacher at Daewon Foreign Language High School, believes that the problem lies not with lackadaisical regulations but with market supply and demand. There are too many Korean parents out there who want their children to be taught by white Americans and too few foreigners to go around. Currently, there are seventeen thousand foreign English teachers employed in Korea. The number has risen threefold over the past seven years, proving how high market demand is for these teachers. And the rate at which they are coming in is only increasing.

So who’s to blame? The government might have failed to screen every single criminal from coming in. But laws can only go so far. Ultimately, it‘s the employer who has to take responsibility. They can start by actually doing checkups on the people they hire. Doing this will, at least, keep fraud college grads and convicts from teaching our children who knows what. There might be a shortage of foreign English teachers in the market. But that doesn’t mean the employers should start hiring drug addicts.

Education is more than just business. Education is parents handing over their children to strangers. Profits might be enticing. But profits aren‘t everything. And employers have a responsibility to their clients: to provide real education in a safe environment.