Kijun Times

By Choi Kang-woo

In 2012, President Park Geun-hye pledged to introduce a new educational policy called a "free learning semester system." It was designed to provide middle school students with a chance to search for their future career through various kinds of job-experience activities.

In the free learning semester, students only take necessary subjects like Korean, mathematics and English, and use the rest of their curriculum time for career exploration, club activities, physical training and art education.

To make sure that students can wholly concentrate on their extra curriculum activities, they do not take exams in the free learning semester.

The government expects this policy to be a stimulus for the development of a diverse career education and a paradigm shift of the conventional Korean educational system, which has been putting emphasis on college entrance exams.

This new program has been tested in 42 middle schools across the nation starting from last year, and this year, 25 percent of middle schools will introduce it to their first grade students.

However, most schools are facing many obstacles in proceeding with the system. First and foremost, parents who are deeply interested in their children's studies worry about the decrease in their children's scholastic ability.

This worry makes parents urge their children to study, and it can completely steer the students away from the desired purpose of this policy. Not only that, the lack of educational infrastructure for vocational experience programs is making it hard for students to make use of the time given to them.

However, a fundamental cause of these problems is adults' perception about jobs and social status. Parents want their children to get jobs that ensure economic stability, such as physicians and lawyers, and they force them to study for such jobs.

This makes students choose to enter academic high school and endure three years of studying, rather than to apply for vocational school, no matter what future career they actually want. As too many students are studying to enter universities, intensive competition follows.

Few winners in this competition get the jobs their parents dreamed of. Students losing the competition could have become people who are need in various fields if they followed their own dreams, not the conventional thoughts of their parents.

However, they usually end up entering the university that fits their test scores, without sincere consideration about what they want to become.

Nevertheless, parents' top priority is whether their children win the competition, not their dreams. That's why the half-done educational system is introduced without enough preparation, and why this system is not working.

In contrast, Ireland has a system called a transition year, which is similar with the free learning semester except that Irish students have a whole year for career exploration. They start transition year after graduating middle school. This system is working effectively, helping students to decide their future on their own.

In Finland, students can get information about when and where they can apply for job education programs from an official website called the "Career Life Introduction Plaza" (peda.net). The significant difference between these countries and Korea is that most parents agree with the idea that it is important for teenagers to think about their future career and get a chance to have various kinds of work experience.

The Korean government is only imitating superficial systems in good cases of job education, while the prevalent idea of adults about education has not changed.

When I decided to enter a foreign language school, a friend of mine went to a vocational school. I was a little bit shocked since she was a talented student who was the top in elementary school, and maintained a good performance in middle school, as well.

If she had chosen to go to the school in pursuit of her dreams, it is pretty inspiring. At least some people's thoughts are changing, and I can capture such meaningful changes in my daily life. I hope that the free learning semester system brings the fresh wind of changes to people's thoughts, and Korean education.

The writer is a first-year student at Daeil Foreign Language High School in Seoul.