One year after Seoul City introduced an ordinance for students’ rights, the Magna Carta for teenagers stands at a crossroads. A new, conservative education chief is vowing to water down its key provisions, and equally conservative Supreme Court can shoot it down by ruling that the entire ordinance is not valid before this year passes.
This is hardly a desirable development not only for students but for the nation’s educational system in the long term.
Any new system is bound to produce both positive and negative results ― the latter usually are more noticeable than the former ― and judging its overall efficacy after just a year’s experimentation is hasty and reckless.
Teachers say the ordinance has made their guidance of unruly students virtually impossible, as teenagers reject unwarranted searches for forbidden items, like cigarettes, while refusing to keep dress codes and hairdo guidelines. Corporal punishment has become all but unthinkable.
The teachers may be right, but we are afraid some of them are bent on playing up the adverse effects of limited cases. A survey by the education office of rights panel has found about 60 percent of students are not aware of the ordinance’s existence, which should be attributable to a majority of school authorities not implementing the ordinance at all in glaring violation of the rules.
In schools that faithfully implemented it, the participants cite positive effects, such as increased mutual respect between teachers and students and among students themselves, greater spontaneity in study and other campus activities and decrease in school violence.
This means the original purposes of the ordinance were right. In Korea, the biggest educational problem was too much study, not too little of it, and excessive stress on competition ― and competitiveness ― often at the expense of students’ basic rights, such as freedom and privacy.
Even for the sake of competitive education, it’s time the forceful, inhumane system gives way to a freer and more spontaneous environment. What’s needed now is supplementing the new system, not throwing it away and going back to the 20th-century ways.
Both the new educational chief and the highest court should put education ahead ideology, and the children’s future before the grown-ups’ wishes.