Sudden development of technology in last decade has been affected to the importance of
peer pressure. Social networking service applications like Facebook or Twitter,
forced their users to know the daily life of their friends, teachers and even
the celebrities. Comments, likes, and reactions from the posts reflected the
common reaction in the society. Not to be a stranger, not to be an outsider,
each member of the society has started to consider the “Peer Pressure”, the
social eye.
This
situation frequently happened in South Korea related with the students in
teenager. In fact, few days ago, I read quite interesting article from the
“TIME”. The link of the article is in the below. Amid of the article, the term
“peer pressure” appeared to explain the harsh reality of Korean students. The
phrase “All we do is study, except when we sleep” in the article surprised me
and helped me to decide the topic of this reflection. Academic peer pressure in
Korean society; competing each other, not helping.
Academic peer
pressure caused the problem not only in the society of children but also in the
entire economic circumstance in South Korea. Another link in the below and the
chart showed terrible situations happening nowadays. Overheated competition
between students forced themselves to go to private academy to beat and survive
in the harsh school environment. Surprisingly, the term “prerequisite learning”
is normally used by the person who learned pedagogy. But, in South Korea, most
of the parents loved to use this word and even the students talked each other
whether having a prerequisite learning or not.
Unfortunately,
KMLA always suffered from these problems, the academic peer pressure and the
private learning. At first, balanced academic peer pressure in elite school
always regarded as a requirement. However, the most important point in premise
is it should be “balanced”. In KMLA, few domestic students often have nickname
started with “GyeonJae” (Translated to check in English). As you can guess,
those nicknames came from their inhumane behavior. For those students, the test
scores and overall reputation as competent students were considered for the
first priority in their life. Every students in South Korea should keep in mind
the dual-aspect of the academic peer pressure.
The next
point is the private learning. Even though school policy tried to prohibit
private learning of the students, most of the domestic students and even
international students preferred to have private learning rather than unsupervised
learning. Yet the writer of the following essay have refused to have AP or SAT private
learning after entering the KMLA. For the case of international students, they normally
decided to have private learning since SAT or AP tests are quite unfamiliar type
of studying for them. However, to survive and to compete with other domestic
students, private learning is more than recommended things to the students in
domestic field. IT IS THE EASIEST WAY TO SURVIVE IN KMLA.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427-2,00.html
Good post. It made me wonder how often Korean kids in "normal" high schools get to experience learning that isn't competitive and instead more collaborative and creative in a group. KMLA does have some of this, but it surely could be more. Well done.
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