Seoul: South Korea’s “wild geese fathers” manage a reunion with their children, and often wives, just once a year after seeing them off for study abroad, invariably to learn in English.

They are, contends a new government zealous to reform, symptomatic of a damaged state education system that forces parents to throw money at private tuition and prevents Asia’s fourthlargest economy from leaping to the world’s top league.

“The government acknowledges that the lack of English is one of the factors that pulls down the competitiveness this country has,” said Education Ministry spokesman Park Baeg-beom.

In the initial enthusiasm after the conservative government won office in December, there were even suggestions of teaching Korean history in English.At least one major South Korean company requires company communication to be in English.

South Koreans, anxious to ensure their offspring are wellschooled, spend around $5 billion a year to educate them abroad — equivalent to nearly 20 per cent of the annual total allocated to education by the government.

At more than 100,000, South Koreans outnumber any other foreign student group in the United States. And the spending at home on private education — mostly to supplement daytime lessons at state school — dwarfs that of most other countries.

The Education Ministry estimates that as a percentage of GDP, South Korean parents spend four times more on average on private education than their counterparts in any other major economy.

Everyone seems to agree that the state schooling system, tinkered with for years by successive governments of differing political ideology, falls miserably short of providing the education on which South Korean society places such a high premium.

Such is the obsession with qualifications that at the annual college entrance exams, the military grounds flights for the day and many offices start late so students on their way to the exam hall are not delayed by the normal rush-hour traffic.

But according to a recent study by the Swiss-based International Institute of Management Development which was widely quoted in local media, the value of all this effort is questionable.

Source : DNA