This mistreatment of native teachers in various ways is too widespread, too undocumented, and too distressing for words to express fully.
Not only is it unethical. It is also a striking example of a lingering paternalism that is still all-too-present in Korean culture – this notion that “certain people do things however they want and the details are no one else’s business.”
What else can be expected when you put all the power: the money, the contract, the visa, the work, the rules, the overall treatment, of a native teacher into the hands of a few people without any way of checking to make sure those people are being true to their word?
It’s definitely the parents’ business to know who teaches what, and how it is taught, to their children. It is definitely a native teacher’s right as a person to be treated with equal and just rights, and not be demoralized and disregarded by traditional Korean methods of tyranny. Such methods should not persist in modern society, or at least in a country that pretends to be one.
How can Korea, or the Ministry of Education, continue to allow or promote such malevolence? How can education take on such a grotesquely underdeveloped shape even after years of time, money, and effort? How can bad schools be allowed to continue and the native teachers, within them, have so little they can do to reach out for help?
It’s time for Korea to shed its cloak of invincibility; it is not as great as it has pretended for so long.
Korea is not, nor has it ever been, ready to take care of native teachers. There is no real system of trust.
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