English Education and the "Korean Wall"
Several years ago, in the dark of Japan's long recession, Murakami Ryu said that superficial reforms would not work because Japan was like a computer that needed to be reformatted. By this, he meant that Japan needed a new operating system to replace the operating system that had driven Japan's economic success from the 1950s to the 1980s. The three pillars of this system; large bureaucratic companies, heavily regulated markets, and active government guidance; that had turned Japan into a stable and successful middle-class society became hopelessly out of date in the dot.com era of borderless, 24-hour economies.
On January 18 this year, the outlines of a new operating system for Japan were announced. "The Prime Minister's Commission on Japan's Goals in the 21st Century" produced a report entitled "The Frontier Within: Individual Empowerment and Better Governance in the New Millennium." At the heart of the report is a call for a new social architecture based on the individual, not the group and the state as in the current operating system, that creates opportunities and respects diversity. To this end, the commission calls for increased local autonomy, acceptance of immigration, political reform, and educational reform. The reform that made the news in Korea, however, is the call for a national dialogue on making English a second official language in Japan.
The idea of making English a second official language in Japan is a call to make Japan's new operating system fully bilingual and "globally compatible." To achieve a paradigm shift of this magnitude requires two things: strong political will and solid English infrastructure. Without strong political will, the project will be doomed by those who find exclusive national culture more comfortable. Without a solid English education infrastructure, proficiency levels will not rise substantially. The development of an English education infrastructure, of course, depends on political will to allocate resources to create a linguistic and cultural environment that is conducive to raising and, equally important, maintaining English proficiency. A comparison of the political will and English education infrastructure in Korea and Japan is revealing in this regard.
The will to integrate the nation to global culture is questionable in Korea. Though Korea has won wide praise for opening up to foreign investors since the 1997 financial crisis, collectivist nationalism remains dominant in Korean public discourse. To its credit, the current government has resisted the pull of collectivist nationalism, but it remains entrenched in the bureaucracy, academia, the media, the labor movement, and most civic
organizations. The media and the educational system continue to extol the virtues of a mythical "uri" based on ethnic and linguistic purity. It is, as Michael Breen, author of a provocative book on Korea entitled "The Koreans: Who They are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies," wrote, "While many foreigners have very warm experiences with some Koreans, they often feel rejected by Koreans in general. They are rejected because Koreans are so nationalistic and have a racist obsession with their blood." This is the great "Korean wall" that makes globalization so problematic in Korea.
Japan is no stranger to collectivist nationalism, but defeat in World War II has put it on the defensive. In its place emerged a more constructive form of nationalism that emphasized economic development and enhancement of Japan's position in the world. This moderate but sustaining nationalism took a broad position in the political center, pushing collectivist nationalism to the left and right respectively. The once strong "Japanese wall" that kept foreigners at bay and that caused Japanese to mistreat Koreans and other Asians has now become weak and porous enough for the members of the prime minister's commission to call for its dismantlement. As long as linking Japan to global culture is presented as an economic imperative and a matter of Japan's stature in the world, the will to embrace change will far outweigh calls for nationalistic retrenchment.
If the will to integrate the nation into global culture is stronger in Japan than what about English education infrastructure? In both nations, English is essentially an "examination language," but Japan has been quietly making more progress on the issue that is at the heart of any effort to improve English proficiency: creating domains of English use in the schools. To develop fluency in a monolingual environment, such as Korea and Japan, students need constant exposure to the language and opportunities to speak it from a young age. Korean and Japanese have no linguistic connection with English, save a few loan words, so learning English is more difficult for Koreans and Japanese than for native speakers of a European language.
To bridge the linguistic gap and encourage daily use of English in schools, teachers must teach in English. Yet, few English teachers and almost no teachers of other subjects have sufficient proficiency to teach confidently in English. Attracting teachers with degrees from English-speaking countries into the profession would help, but this is
difficult because teachers' salaries are so low. Importing a large number of foreign teachers would solve this problem, but budgetary problems and the "Korean wall" make this difficult. Universities could do more to raise the proficiency level of prospective teachers, but this too would require creating domains of English use on campus. Given the rampant corruption and anti-foreign attitudes in many universities, it is unlikely that
universities will be willing to start hiring foreigners as tenured faculty. When pressed, university authorities will say that they cannot attract qualified foreigners, but the reality is that they have not tried.
The situation in Japan is better. The first obvious difference is pay; Japanese teachers simply make more money relative to other occupations than Korean teachers do. According to the Ministry of Education, the average monthly pay (without subsidies) for public and private high school teachers at the average age of 42 was 362,000 yen (3,650,000 won) a month in 1995. Though monthly subsidies and bonuses vary, the average yearly pay would be over six million yen (60 million won) a year, which is on par with most salaries in business. Even with the high cost of living factored in, this
figure is still much higher than what Korean teachers make. For all the talk of "collapsing schools," the teaching profession continues to attract talented people because of decent pay and job security.
The weakening of the "Japanese wall" has brought about a steady increase in the number of native speakers and foreigners who teach as a regular members of staff at various levels of the education system. One such example the kindergarten and elementary school English immersion program in the schools run by the Katoh School Foundation in Shizuoka.
A growing number of private middle schools and high schools, such as the Kyoto Seian Schools are creating intensive English courses inside the traditional curriculum. Though not without its critics, the AET (Assistant English Teacher) program has put thousands of native-speaker teaching assistants in public schools successfully since the mid-1980s. A number of universities have a diverse faculty of tenured foreign professors, many who teach in English whether they are native speakers or not. According to "University Rankings 2000" published by the Asahi Shimbun, foreigners make up 10% or more of tenured professors at 65 of 632 four-year universities in Japan. Experiments in immersion and intensive programs and in integrating foreigners into the educational system provide important precedents that other Japanese institutions can follow to create
domains of English use in the educational system.
Outside of education, Japan is also ahead of Korea. The quality of English-language newspapers is better, as is the quality of English in official publications and in books published in Japan. One only needs to compare local government Web sites in Japan with those in Korea to see the difference. Other language industries; translation, editing,
proofreading; produce higher quality work than in Korea. Tourist information in English is readily available and usually free of the typographical errors and awkward expressions found in Korea. The quality of print and online English produced in Japan already comes close to matching that of Hong Kong and Singapore. This reflects the positive interaction between Japanese and native speakers in the language industries that play a critical role in ensuring that "made-in-Japan" English is comprehensible elsewhere.
In the end, reformatting English education in Korea so that most Koreans will able to use English effectively throughout their adult lives will hit the "Korean wall." For deep down, most Koreans believe in the wall and view its defenders as virtuous. As long as the "Korean wall" has moral value, supporters of English as a second official language will be treated as immoral. Defenders of the wall will argue against "English imperialism" and "Western hegemony," without defining what these things are. They will argue that creating English-speaking domains in the schools will hurt Korean literacy education and cause students to lose their national identity. Yet, they do not know that research in Europe consistently shows that bilingualism enhances native-language learning and the learning of additional language later in life.
The problem with the "Korean wall" is that it isolates Korea from the rest of the world at a time when the major ethnicity-based nation states, such as France, Germany, and Japan, are moving to redefine themselves as multicultural states deeply linked to the emerging regional and global culture. If current trends continue there will be few monocultural and monolingual nations left in the world by 2030. Living and working with different people and in different languages, with English as the global link language when necessary, will be a way of life for most people. In such a world, maintaining the "Korean wall" will exact a high price; the rest of the world will look at Korea as museum of 20th-century ideas and write it off as irrelevant.
Robert J. Fouser
Associate Professor, Kumamoto Gakuen University
E-mail: heungbob@hanmail.net
