Korean Teachers Head to Florida; Will They Teach Anti-Americanism?
Schools in Broward and Palm Beach counties are tapping a new source of teachers: South Korea.
The Asian nation has more teachers than it needs, and the Korean government is helping them find jobs abroad, said Andrea Seidman, president of Teachers Council, a nonprofit agency that helps place instructors.
Teachers Council has helped Broward and Palm Beach find Korean teachers in recent weeks. Broward has hired three for next year; Palm Beach likely will hire five, recruitment director Marcia Andrews said. Representatives of both school districts say they want to start with just a few to see how they adapt to American life.
I wonder if we can expect to see charming and artistic works of art from the children of Florida such as this seen in South Korea:
Or how about the teachers teaching facts such as this to the children of Florida:
Consider the following question, posed to 400,000 Korean students in a grade school exam: Which of the following descriptions of Iraq after the Gulf War is incorrect?
A) Due to economic sanctions, infant mortality increased by 150 percent, and in some areas, 70 percent of newborns had leukemia.
B) The United States and Britain conducted a bombing campaign against Iraq for 11 years after the war, causing terror among the Iraqi people.
C) Cancer among Iraqi children in 1999 was 700 percent because of depleted uranium left from the bombing.
D) The infant mortality rate of Iraqi children in 1999 was 300 percent higher than it was a decade earlier.
E) Not a single Iraqi starved to death after the Gulf War because of the extensive food relief program.
This question, and many more like it, comprised a supplemental teaching package on the second Iraq war that was distributed two years ago by the Korea Teachers and Educational Workers Union, the Los Angeles Times reported in July 2003. The package allegedly included graphic photographs of child casualties and urban destruction from the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
According to national education law, teachers who belong to unions are permitted to incorporate such supplemental teaching materials into the mainstream curriculum. School principals technically have the power to regulate what is used, though this rarely occurs.
In one controversial instance, a teacher leading a class on the U.S. military role in South Korea showed her seventh-grade students a police photo of a naked Korean prostitute who was murdered and sexually assaulted in 1992 with an umbrella by an American serviceman.
The offending teacher, who subsequently did not lose her job, argued that such material was widely available on the Internet for public viewing. She echoed the opinion of other unionized educators who contend they oppose war of any kind, and are not waging a targeted smear campaign against the United States.
South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun — who dispatched the third-largest contingent of foreign troops to Iraq — supported the union’s position, saying that “antiwar education should be encouraged but only as long as it is not anti-American, in consideration of our diplomatic relations.”
Even better yet they can teach this:
Today’s texts contain pictures of North Korean food shops (“A lot of women,” reads the caption, helpfully, “are participating in economic activity”) and suggest students practice writing letters to their counterparts across the border (without mentioning that North Korea prohibits mail from the South.) In today’s classrooms, you can find a third-grade textbook with a cartoon of two boys from either side of the border deciding not to throw rocks at each other.
Northern Boy: I’m sorry I threw the rock at you first.
Southern Boy: I’m sorry, too. It is not right for brothers to throw rocks at each other.
Northern Boy: Our parents and ancestors would be grieved to see us fighting.
Southern Boy: Speaking of which, do you want to participate in the international Ping-Pong game together as one team? … If we become one team, we can make up for our weakness and no other country will be able to beat us.
Teachers need little encouragement to use such texts. Park Geun Byung, a teacher at Song Chun elementary school in Seoul, uses a storybook that instructs his fourth-grade class in the tale of an evil dragon that prevents a Romeo and Juliet on either side of a river from marrying. The river is plainly the DMZ. The evil dragon is meant to represent the U.S. Park is a believer in what he calls “unification education.” “Teachers,” he adds, “don’t have to be neutral.”
