Indian school children (Photo: Elliot Hannon)

Across India, education is seen as the key to continuing the country’s economic rise, and including more people in the newfound boom. India is known for turning out doctors and engineers, and opportunities abound for educated job-seekers. But for many in India, getting a quality education — or any education at all — remains a challenge. In fact, nearly half of India’s children don’t get past primary school.

There are many reasons for the high-dropout rate, according to Sujata Khanna of Butterflies, an educational NGO.

“Many of these children are working, whether it’s working within their household, taking care of a sibling while their parents are out, or working outside and earning money for their family,” Khanna said. “Or it could be that the school is too far away for them to walk.”

To get kids back in school, Butterflies decided to bring the classroom directly to areas with the highest dropout rates.

The group gutted a bright yellow school bus and remade it into a mobile classroom, called the Chalta Firta School. It’s equipped with a small library of books, and shelves of crayons and toys, everything a teacher might need to run a classroom.

On hot days, and when attendance overcrowds the school bus classroom, class is held outside. In one class, two teachers circle a group of 30 children, ranging in age from 6 to 14. The teachers go through a condensed lesson plan aimed at getting children ready to enroll in a formal school. They cover everything from math and science to English and yoga.

Anchan, who’s 10 years old, has never been to school before. She said she likes to study in the bus. “I want my dreams to come true,” she said. “I want to go to school.”

Many of the families of these students have migrated from other parts of India. They work as day laborers or run small roadside tea stalls. To scratch out a living, the entire family often has to help.

Sundri and her husband came to New Delhi with their three children several years ago because there were no jobs at in their village, 50 miles from Delhi. Despite the meager living conditions, their new home is an improvement, especially for her three children, and she’s looking to the mobile classroom to make sure her children won’t have to do the same thing.

“My husband and I couldn’t become anything,” Sundri said, “but I really want my children to become something, anything. Make them anything you wish, but make sure they become something” – and that, she said, starts with going to school.

In the farming town of Rodeo, the education revolution kind of looks like a science fair. Little kids in booths papered with posters earnestly explain how to harvest ch’aki jawas beans. They chant about corn in Quechua, an indigenous language. The moms and dads here say they can’t imagine this happening when they were little.

Almost two thirds of Bolivians are indigenous, and they’ve long suffered discrimination here, including in school. Alejandra Cruz said that when she moved from a small village to the capital La Paz, the other children tormented her because she spoke Aymara, another indigenous language.

“They hit me, they pulled my braids. They kicked me when I passed by. They dumped my breakfast all over me. And then there were insults,” Cruz said.

When Cruz had her own children, she didn’t speak Aymara to them so that they wouldn’t suffer the same insults.

Today Cruz teaches Aymara to preteens in a tony part of La Paz, something she never could have imagined when she was a little girl.

“I thank God for a government like this,” Cruz said.

Under a law passed in December 2010, all schoolchildren must learn Quechua, Aymara or some other indigenous language, as well as Spanish and a foreign tongue.

Marielle Cauthin, who worked in the Ministry of Education while the reforms were in the works, said the idea is to make schools respect and embrace local cultures. For example, she said, teachers used to scold children who had dirty hands from working in the fields.

“What teachers need to understand,” Cauthin said, “is that the dirt on their hands reflects their work in the country.”

The education reform law is loaded with bold words like “decolonization,” “liberation,” and “anti-imperialist.” It’s the kind of rhetoric that helped Morales win votes and adoration.

But that adoration is starting to fade.

Protesters in Cochabamba recently took to the streets, chanting that Morales said things would change, but that was a lie. Demonstrators have forced Morales to back down on fuel price hikes and the rerouting of a planned highway. Many of the same people who backed Morales now question whether he really stands for the things he promised, like indigenous rights and the environment. Education reform hasn’t been as explosive, but it could still be a fight.

Jose Luis Alvarez, president of the teachers union of La Paz, is a radical Marxist who thinks the education reforms don’t get at the real inequalities in one of the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin America.

“The new law is condemned to fail,” Alvarez said.” The only thing that they’re doing is repeating things that have failed.”

Alvarez said he believes that because economic inequalities still exist, the reforms will suffer the same fate as the last round of education reform in the 1990s. Back then, the government also tried to bring Aymara and Quechua into many schools, but many indigenous parents resisted. They worried their children would face discrimination. Those fears still exist for some families.

Maria Luisa Velarde, who teaches at a technical school, said her students prefer English because it gives them more opportunities for jobs; it opens more doors. She said they don’t see Aymara as being very important even though their parents and grandparents speak it.

In the meantime, Bolivian schools are preparing to implement reforms. Teachers are taking night classes to learn indigenous languages. But schools complain that there’s been little training to explain what “decolonization” means for first graders or even high-school seniors.

In a high school in sprawling El Alto, Principal Luis Cameo Borda said they’re still waiting for more details. They aren’t sure what this revolution means for them.

If the Bolivian government doesn’t give them clearer instructions about what “decolonization” really means in the classroom, Borda said, nothing will change.

Emily Alpert reported this story with the help of the International Reporting Project.

But there aren’t enough jobs for all these highly educated students. So now the Korean government is trying something new. It’s encouraging families to consider something other than college for their kids.

Lee Gun-young, a 19-year-old college student, headed toward In Jang Boys High School. Lee was about to take Korea’s high-stakes university entrance exam for the second time.

“I feel confident,” he said. “This test will determine the rest of my life”

Famous Universities

Lee wasn’t the only student taking the test for the second, and in some cases, third time. Many hope to improve their test scores so they can transfer to a better university.

Still, for most Korean families, there are only four schools in the entire country that really matter.

Bae Tae-il, who dropped off his son at the testing center, said a college’s name really means a lot in South Korea.

“If you get into a famous university, you have more opportunities to define your life,” he said. “You get more respect from other people depending on what school you go to.”

But some observers warn that Korea’s obsession with getting into “the right school” is out of sync with the job market.

Jasper Kim, a visiting scholar at Harvard who teaches East-West comparative studies, said Korea is experiencing “educational inflation.”

“There are a lot of highly educated, arguably over-educated people, but on the flip side, the demand side, they all want to work for a narrow bandwidth of companies, namely the LGs and Samsungs of the world,” Kim said. “But they only need a few people and they only pluck those people from a certain narrow bandwidth of schools. So the question is what happens to the rest of the pack who don’t get selected.”

According to Kim, they become second-class citizens, with fewer opportunities for employment and even marriage.

Government figures indicate that less than half of 2010′s university grads have found full time jobs. And Korean media regularly feature stories about master’s degree holders taking low-skill jobs away from those with only high-school diplomas.

One way the South Korean government is trying to address these problems is to promote vocational schools as an alternative to college.

Meister Schools

Even the South Korean President is getting involved. Lee Myung Bak was on hand in 2010 for the opening of the Sudo Electric Technical High school in Seoul.

Sudo is one of 21 so-called Meister Schools, which are modelled on German academies. They’re fully funded by the South Korean government.

All Meister students are guaranteed a job once they graduate, through an agreement with Korea’s electric power authority. Some, like 17-year-old Lee Se-kyul, have already been offered jobs, in his case, with Samsung’s electronics engineering department.
Lee said if he went to a normal high school or university, I would’ve had a much harder time finding a job, especially at Samsung.

“I have no regrets about going to this type of school,” he said.

Getting South Korean companies to accept students without a university degree is one thing.

Getting acceptance from Korean society may be more difficult.

Geum Donghoe, who teaches in Sudo’s IT department, said the technical education here is as good as you get at some universities.

“I don’t see that much difference between our students and those who have some special degree,” Geum Donghoe said. “Maybe once our students’ performance comes out, then maybe people would admit they don’t have to go to a prestigious school or graduate school”

But deciding to skip college is still a hard choice for young Koreans.

Sudo student Seo Hyun Joo said she’ll keep her options open.

“I’ll still be young and have many options to choose from after I graduate,” she said.

“I’ll start work and see how I like it. If I don’t, I’ll just study for the university exam.”

Young girls in Benghazi accompany their father to a one of the many demonstrations in support of the rebels near the city's main courthouse. (Photo: Al Jazeera English)

A new prime minister has been named, a new transitional government is imminent, and new portraits of fallen martyrs replace pictures of Gaddafi in public spaces.

But perhaps one of the most crucial changes is happening in more discreet locations – in schools, all across the country.

Over his more than four decades of dictatorship, Gaddafi used the country’s schools to get his ideology into the minds of his citizens.

From primary to university level, Libya’s national curriculum is now being cleansed of Gaddafi’s far-reaching influence.

“We don’t want anything that signifies him – neither his name, his family, nor his symbols and signature green color,” said Mohammed Sawi, director of the National Curriculum Reform Office, which is based in Tripoli

It’s a newly formed team of 160 experts charged with rewriting curriculum throughout Libya’s entire public school system.

For now, the Libyan experts are doing an initial, rapid purge of the most flagrant pro-Gaddafi elements in schools. It’s a stop-gap solution until Libya’s transitional period ends and a new government is elected in eight months. Then, according to Sawi, the larger task of long-term revision will start.

“There are no foreign experts because what we are doing is provisional, for one year,” Sawi said. “After that, experts will be brought in from abroad and we will do an international conference to see what we can do in term of broader changes to the curriculum.”

Getting Rid of Subjects

For now, the easiest change is getting rid of subjects like Al-Mujtama Al-Jamahariya, the study of the “Green Book” – Gaddafi’s core treatise on politics and civic life.

But beyond that, many remaining subjects require severe changes. Gaddafi, a strident anti-colonialist, refused to allow what he considered “Western” symbols – for instance, “cm” for centimeters and “kg” for kilogram. Hatem Mhenni, a member of the reform committee, said all symbols in Libyan education will be changed to meet international norms.

“We changed all the symbols that were in Arabic before into Latin script,” Mhenni said. “We corrected many spelling errors and technical errors as well.”

History, which had amounted to glorifying Gaddafi and his regime, is being rewritten from scratch. Until that’s done, the subject has been suspended from the national curriculum.

Subjects like geography would seem less problematic. But education reformer Mahmoud al Chawadi said maps in Libyan schoolbooks were used to confuse rather than inform the students.

“Gaddafi was afraid that the students or their parents could revolt at any time, so it was important that they feel far from each other,” Chawadi said. “So in the maps, he created a big separation between east and west Libya – a vast, impenetrable desert – to disorient people and make sure they felt divided, not united.”

Officials have said that schools won’t have a more Islamic bent, though they will add a subject called Islamic Consciousness. But like everything else in Libya now, it’s hard to predict how schooling will shake out until the constitution is written and a new government is chosen.

But these days, the Ministry of Education’s eyes are set on more immediate goals: the new, temporary curriculum and textbooks set to roll out to an estimated one million Libyan students by January 14th.

Until then, classes continue at places like the Rixos Technical High School in Tripoli.

Larger Education Goals

The school’s principal, Brahim Al Hajaji, said the larger goal of removing the false ideas and mentalities cultivated through more than four decades of Gaddafi indoctrination may take quite a long time.

“I think a lot about the future of the students and the children of this country,” said Al Hajaji. “The big challenge is the little kids who love Gaddafi and don’t know why they love him.”

17-year-old Epthal Abu Bakker said whenever she used to criticize Gaddafi, other kids would tease her and beat her. Now the power has changed, and Epthal can express her opinions without danger.

“We have to know, the children have to know, what they missed before,” Epthal said. “About the grandparents, the old people, how they were. We have to know why Gaddafi came, why he did all that.”

With the dictator gone, Libya’s future is uncertain – the country is awash in weapons, and the revolutionaries are finding it hard to be good politicians.

But in the country’s schools, the horizon is relatively bright — assuming the country’s political journey continues smoothly.

Landlocked because it’s surrounded by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran. Mountainous because the Caucasus traverse this region.

And passionate? About the game of chess. There are more than 30 Grandmasters among a population of just over three million people. Now schoolchildren are getting an early jump on mastering the game.

Can you name this chess-loving country? It is Armenia, where reporter Shant Shahrigian had a look at the chess program in elementary schools:

Armenia’s public schools started mandatory chess classes for every second, third and fourth grader in the former Soviet republic this year. Twice a week, seven- to ten-year-old Armenians are getting a half hour of instruction in chess basics, with the goal of being able to play a competent game by the end of fourth grade.

One of those schools is Public School 81 where Grigor Martikian is drilling 20 second graders on how to move the bishop. He positions a bishop into the corner of a large model board in front of the class.

The students follow along on chess mats on their desks.

Edouard Aroustian and Seta Kevorkian are both seven and have learned a new checkmate move. When I ask them if they know about Armenia’s national chess team, they nod and smile.

That team was the pride of Armenia this past summer, when it won the World Chess Team Championship in Ningbo, China. Armenians treat chess champions like star athletes. Chess is one of the most popular games here and there are 32 grandmasters in a population of about 3 million.

Smbat Lputian is the president of Armenia’s chess academy. He spent the summer organizing training sessions for teachers around the country.
Lputian says mandatory chess isn’t so much about training the next generation of grandmasters.It is more about fostering critical thinking and imparting values.

“Chess is a very honest game, a fair game,” says Lputian. “A person learns how to play honestly. It is giving a seven-year-old child a chance to think and make a decision. Chess is probably one of the best games for concentrating one’s attention on something for a long time.”

That said, Armenia probably wouldn’t mind if the classes also produce a new crop of chess champions.

Lputian says the curriculum begins in the second grade because Armenian psychologists found that was the earliest time students can start to absorb the game.

At a private school a few miles down the road, students are also playing chess. The Mkhitar Sebastaci school has had a full time chess teacher for years but chess is just another elective here.

The school’s principal, Ashot Bleyan says there’s a popular view in Armenia that chess is a miraculous tool for fixing the country’s education problems. “The simplicity of this approach disgusts me,” he says.

Bleyan himself is a former education minister but current officials seem set on the compulsory classes. The government has already spent more than $ 2 million on them – a considerable investment for this still developing country.

There’s no shortage of studies related to bilingual education. Here are the cases for and against . Also, the National Association for Bilingual Education, and some other links.

Reporter Andrea Smardon of WGBH-Boston has been looking at why the ban came into being, and its effects– whether non-English speakers are now picking English faster, or whether they’re dropping out of school. There’s more on her series here.

Also in the pod, more conversation with UK-based American, Lynne Murphy. Murphy teaches linguistics at the University of Sussex. She also writes the clever and droll blog, Separated by a Common Language. In the last podcast, we talked about twangy accents, pronunciation of the world water, and the declining status of British English in the United States. This time, we consider politeness, and why neither Yanks nor Brits live up to each others’ expectations. One word encapsulates this: toilet. Misuse this word at your peril. But there are others: excuse me and sorry have subtle differences in usage, which if you don’t get them right, may result in the locals thinking you arrogant.

Murphy has an entertaining theory about British people and the word sorry. If you’ve spent any time in the UK, you’ll know that the word comes up all the time, especially in official announcements (“We are sorry to announce that the 9:16 train to Chingford is delayed due to a staff shortage.”). But when Brits bump into people– which they do a lot on their crowded island– they don’t always apologize. Murphy suspects this is because they are in denial about having made any physical contact.

We round off the pod with some girl pop from the 1960s, en español.

Back then, Francisco Franco was still running Spain with an iron fist, and his government resisted anything that smacked of youthful rebellion. But there were mini skirts (not quite so mini in Spain). And there were carefree female singers.

Spain’s best known singer was Marisel.

Marisel is one of many artists featured in a new CD called Chicas: Spanish Female Singers 1962 to 1974.

Most of the tunes on the CD were released as original singles, composed by Spanish song writers.

They had been influenced by British rock, American soul and dance crazes like the twist. The lyrics are Spanish, but the musical language is very much imported.

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And in many of those classrooms, the students are increasingly too young to have many actual memories of their own of that day’s events.

I visited two high school classes in the San Francisco Bay Area to see how teachers are approaching the topic, what the students know and don’t know, and how they feel about the events surrounding that day.

History teacher Kent Holubar at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, Calif. (Photo: Jason Margolis)

Russia has long been battling an Islamist insurgency in the country’s Northern Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. The Kremlin has fought two separatist wars in Chechnya. There are near-daily attacks on police and government officials there.

And not infrequently, the violence spills over into Russian cities.

“Our teachers tell us that we have to be careful, of course. And our teachers tell us that we have to see the face and try to be so careful,” said student Anastasia Zavyalova.

Zavyalova sits on a bench near a playground in central Moscow. Her pretty blue eyes become as huge as saucers when she describes the type of person she’s learned to steer clear of at all costs.

“Avoid the people of Caucasus. They have black dresses; we can notice it in their eyes. We were very afraid, these people were very bad; they wanted to kill Russian girls and Russian children,” said Zavyalova.

Many analysts and the government opposition blame the situation in the Caucasus – and the resulting violence in Russian cities – on the Kremlin’s oppressive approach to its former republics. The government maintains that a hard hand is needed to keep rebels and insurgents from their main goal of killing innocent people.

Back on the playground bench Zavyalova says she often asks her teachers why Russians should avoid people from the northern Caucasus. She says their response is very well, Soviet – in other words, no explanation is given.

“No history. Really no history. Because we have situation. This is our problem and our teachers say we have to avoid them. They are bad. Not why,” said Zavyalova.

“How we find truth?,” asked 17-year old Maxim Titov. “I read historical books sometimes or in Internet. I do my own opinions about this.”

Titov says you can’t really rely on Russian teachers to explain why these horrible acts of terrorism keep happening here in the former Soviet Union. There’s no historical context at all.

Titov might not be too far off. Many analysts say educators are still using the same teaching methods as during Soviet times when the Kremlin dictated how history was to be interpreted.

Fifteen-year-old John Rose, whose father is American, couldn’t agree more. He says when the country’s largest airport, Domodedova, located just outside of Moscow, was the target of a suicide bombing in January, he was told to suit up and get ready to fight.

“They took us to this subbasement at school. It was probably a bunker at some point. They had us assembling and disassembling Kalashnikov rifles. So apparently Russian junior high school students are the last line of defense against a terrorist threat,” said Rose.

That’s right, a “teachable moment” tossed aside and in its place students learned how to fight back.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has made it no secret that Russian education is the pits. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, teaching standards have fallen due to corruption, a lack of funding, outdated textbooks and an often-uneducated workforce.

Until changes are made, many of the country’s children are left to learn the way their Soviet-era parents did; just do what you’re told and don’t ask too many questions.

Student John Rose says at least he has a good sense of humor about it. When he told his mother about his shooting adventures, his mom said it could have been worse. She explained what she’d been taught as a young girl.

“In the event of an atomic explosion, the first thing you should do is hold rifle away from you so that it doesn’t melt on your government issued boots. If you’re not going to live, at least make sure your boots do,” said Rose.

No-one in Britain seems satisfied with the state of the nation. There’s finger-pointing galore: at the looters, the police, the Murdoch press, the politicians, the footballer-celebrities. And, of course, at the immigrants.

As of late 2010 the UK requires applicants for some immigrant visas to take a proficiency test in the English language. If you want to settle in Britain, the logic goes, you should learn the language. Cities should not be multilingual mosaics. Everyone should speak the common language.

Try telling that to the 58-year-old Indian husband of Rashida Chapti. Chapti, a naturalized British citizen, was born in India. Her husband still llives there. Before the language requirement came into effect, securing a resident and work visa for her husband would have been virtually automatic, as it is in the many nations that have family reunification immigration policies. But in Britain, Chapti’s husband must now prove that he has a basic command of English.

Chapti’s husband lives in a remote village, more than 100 miles from the nearest city, where he could take English lessons. In any case, she says, he wouldn’t be able to afford the lessons. Chapti is suing the British government under the European Convention of Human Rights.

Also, in Britain, the town of Barnsley has starting fining people for swearing in public. Heck, yeah. Not sure how widely that’s being enforced amid the riots and looting (which, I hasten to add, have not spread to Barnsley).

In Alaska, meanwhile, no-one’s too worried about swearing. (I briefly lived in Alaska, where I learned a great deal about American English expletive usage.) Some Alaskan children are learning a language. But not English, which they already speak.

These kids are the American-born children of Sudanese refugees. They are learning their parents’ native Nuer language. Some may end up speaking it at home. Some may use it if they visit their parents’ homeland. Some may never use it outside their Anchorage classroom.

Finally in the pod this week, a conversation with Greg Barker, director of Koran by Heart.This is the story of three children who take part in a competition to memorize and publicly recite the entire Koran.

Hearing the interview reminded me of an encounter I had a few years ago in Bangladesh. I visited a madrassa, a religious school. The school building was essentially a countryside shack. Inside were a few tiny classrooms, each with a dozen or more students crammed inside.

I talked with several students, including one who told me of his primary educational goal: to memorize the Koran. He recited a lengthy segment of it for me– in Arabic, not his native tongue, Bengali. He’s the student on the far left in the picture below.

I also talked to the head of the madrassa. He said that although this was a religious school, most parents who sent their kids here weren’t especially devout. The choice, like in so many parts of the world, was between underfunded, sub-par government schools and religious school like this one.

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[photos: Wiki Commons, Annie Feidt; Patrick Cox]

Hugo Chavez was first elected president of Venezuela in 1998. He came to power vowing to use the country’s oil wealth to improve the lives of its poorest citizens. By some accounts, he is delivering. Living standards are improving in Venezuela.

But the president’s critics say Chavez is falling short of his own rhetoric. Given the country’s vast oil wealth, they claim Venezuela ought to be in much better shape.

One focus of the Chavez government is education. To improve computer literacy, the government is giving away nearly 2 million laptops to primary school students.

A school girl with a new government-issued computer. (Photo: John Otis)

In fact, government statistics on health, education and economic development point to a substantial, if not great, leap forward. All this comes after Venezuela registered one of the world’s worst economic declines between 1970 and 1998, the year Chavez was elected.

Under Chavez, unemployment and poverty have been cut by half. Infant mortality is falling. New clinics and hospitals are going up.

But for all the positive data, Venezuela is rarely held up as a model for development, largely because Chavez himself is so controversial.

Critics view Chavez as a populist demagogue. They dismiss his social welfare programs as cynical maneuvers to win over the masses and remain in power. They also claim that soaring street crime, frequent power outages and the highest rate of inflation in Latin America have wiped out some of the gains.

Luis Pedro España, a development expert at Catholic University in Caracas, said Chavez has simply lucked out by presiding over Venezuela’s first oil boom in 30 years and record high petroleum prices.

Slum residents buy food at a government grocery that sells subsidized food. (Photo: John Otis)

España called the changes under Chavez more superficial rather than structural.

For example, the jobless rate has dropped partly because the government has nearly doubled the number of state workers. Doctors and nurses have been stationed in poor barrios to serve as first responders. But those who need major surgery must often rely on rundown public hospitals that lack medicine and equipment.

At a government store that sells subsidized food, orthodontist Rosalva Mogollon said her office at a nearby public hospital lacks an air compressor. Mogollon said she can’t treat her patients, so she’s out buying groceries.

Not far from the grocery store sits a community center where the government’s largesse includes a large dose of political ideology. At the center, people get medical checkups and attend workshops on how to defend the Chavez revolution.

At a workshop at a government community center, people learn about their rights enshrined in the Venezuelan Constitution. (Photo: John Otis)

As they prepare for presidential elections next year, even opposition politicians are now borrowing a page from the Chavez playbook, according to pollster Luis Vicente Leon.

“Everybody is supporting social programs because we realize that we need to help these people,” he said. “I think this is the best thing that Chavez has done in Venezuela in these 12 years.”

(Photo: Tungsten)

By Jason Strother

The pressure to get good grades at an elite American university, like Harvard, or Princeton, or Yale, can be overwhelming. But the pressure to get good grades at a top university in South Korea can be even worse.

The Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology is a case in point. Four students at KAIST have taken their own lives in the past five months.

KAIST is one of South Korea’s most prestigious universities, and its graduates are practically assured a job in the science and engineering fields.

KAIST models its curriculum on American universities; even the classes are taught in English. And that makes it tough for some students, said a 22-year old math major. who asked to be called Chung.

“Many students haven’t experienced lectures done by English, so when they come near they need some help,” Chung said.
Switching to Korean, Chung added that what makes studying at KAIST especially stressful, though, is the school’s unique tuition policy.

Undergrads at KAIST attend tuition free – as long as they maintain a 3.0 grade point average. But if their grades slip, they have to start paying tuition – up to $5,500 per semester. It can be a financial burden on a family, and a source of shame.
KAIST said three of the four students who committed suicide didn’t have the grades to get free tuition, and that’s caused some critics here to blame the tuition policy for the deaths. They say KAIST president Suh Nam-pyo also shares some responsibility.

Suh recently appeared on television and in front of lawmakers to apologize for the suicides. He promised to end his school’s competitive tuition system.

Officials at KAIST declined to be interviewed for this story. But Choi In-ho, a KAIST student council vice president, said the critics may not know the whole story.

“We can’t say that the suicides were just the result of the tuition fees; those students could have had other problems,” Choi said.

Still, he added that he thinks the current policy punishes students who are already falling behind and he’s glad to see it go. So is Kim Jong-duk, a chemical engineering professor at KAIST. He said Koreans have a deeply ingrained notion that education is the means to a family’s social betterment, so students at KAIST and all over Korea feel enough pressure already.

“Parents and school and society push them to have better scores and higher academic achievement,” Kim said, adding that they feel that if you get a high score, you’re the hope for the family.

Several students I spoke with echoed that sentiment. But one 22-year-old chemical engineering major, who didn’t want to give her name, said her family doesn’t put pressure on her.

“They think the most important thing in my life is happiness, not study,” she said.

For thousands of parents here, their children’s happiness means taking them out of the Korean education system all together.

Suh Hee-jung, 50, decided to send her son and daughter to the United States for high school and college. She said Korean schools are too competitive and students have no freedom, and she doesn’t want that type of life for her kids.
“The Korean education system is focused only on studying and only a student’s grades are important,” she said. “There’s no opportunity for a student to play sports or do other activities. I just don’t think kids can have a happy life here as a student.”

At KAIST, the administration has recently announced changes that some students hope will make their lives a little happier and less stressful.

Starting this fall, all students will be guaranteed eight semesters of free education, no matter what their GPA is.

Student council vice president Choi In-ho said it’s a good start, but the pressure doesn’t begin at KAIST.
“It’s a general problem in Korean society,” Choi said, “whether in middle school or high school, students have the same stress.”

By Jason Strother

Education is highly prized in South Korea. Most grade schoolers study English, taught by native speakers flown in from around the globe. But at one school in South Korea, students have been studying with the help of a teacher who didn’t come from abroad. In fact, she was completely assembled in Korea.

Meet Engkey, the Hagjeong Primary School’s newest English teacher. She’s about 3-feet tall and shaped kind of like a penguin.

She’s a robot.

Engkey wheels around the front of the classroom and stops in front of each of the six 4th graders taking part in this educational pilot program. She asks them to repeat English phrases and leads them in song.

Engkey is not entirely a robot. She’s hooked up via teleconference to the Philippines, where an English teacher conducts the class through a video monitor. It’s a kind of outsourcing.

When Engkey speaks, students hear the instructor’s voice, and they see a Caucasian face that appears on Engkey’s retractable LCD panel head.

More than a screen on wheels

But Engkey’s creators say this robot is much more than just a video screen on wheels. Kim Mun-sang, director of the Intelligent Robotics Program at the publicly funded Korea Institute for Science and Technology in Seoul, said Engkey is more like an avatar.

“We can detect the motion of the English teacher. As soon as the teacher moves his or her hand, the robot raises its hand. If the teacher laughs, we can detect a laughing expression. So the robot can do just what the English teacher does,” Kim said.

Engkey also has an autonomous mode, said Kim. The robot is programmed to help students with their English pronunciation, and it plays a little tune when they get a word right.

Saving money

Learning English is all about repetition and that makes a robot an ideal teacher, according to Jang Byoung-ok, the principal at the Hagjeong School. He added there’s another reason to choose robots over foreign teachers. They’re cheaper. Jang said it costs around $40 thousand a year to support a foreign English teacher in Korea; it’s about half the price to build an Engkey and contract with a teacher in the Philippines.

But there are better ways for the government to save money and improve education here, according to Yu Do Hyun, who lectures in English education and pedagogy at Seoul’s Kookmin University.

“We need Korean teachers for beginners and intermediates,” Yu said, adding that Korean teachers know how to teach English to Korean students. English teaching robots would also deprive students of the most basic reason to learn a foreign language, human interaction, Yu said. “Communication is between humans, so they need practice with native, human teachers. Even though they may practice English with the robots, when they meet human native speakers, they will be very nervous, because they haven’t conversed with real speakers.”

Engkey’s creator, Kim Mun-sang, said he’d like to see all Korean schools use robots one day, but isn’t so sure they could ever completely replace human teachers.

In the end, Kim said, it’s the students who will determine whether robots can be successful substitute teachers. At the Hagjeong School, Engkey receives high marks from the students. One 10-year-old boy who goes by the English name is Tony said he was a little nervous about the robot at first, but he liked its singing and dancing.

His classmate, 10-year-old Charlotte, said, “I like the robot teacher better than human teachers.”

(image: BBC)

• BBC coverage: full speech itemized and video
• White House Facebook page
• NY Times interactive: Who sat where seating chart

Sputnik 1 - the world's first artificial satellite (Image:NASA)

President Obama’s message in the State of the Union address last night was clear. The United States needs to get its act together or risk losing its place in the world.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” said the President.

The president’s rhetoric got us thinking about the original Sputnik moment, and what it unleashed, and whether it’s relevant to today’s challenges.

On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite into space. Cathleen Lewis, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said the spacecraft wasn’t that sophisticated.

“It was simply a hollow sphere with two transmitters on board, and batteries,” Lewis said.

And it while it didn’t surprise Americans involved in the space race, it shocked the public.

“The point of Sputnik was this was the first public awareness this competition was going on,” said Lewis. “And that the Soviet Union had the capability of launching warheads to anywhere in the world.”

That realization took the cold war competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to a whole new level. Von Hardesty, co-author of “Epic Rivalry: The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race”, remembers watching Sputnik move across the sky through binoculars from the roof of his college dorm.

“This was a really traumatic moment,” Hardesty said. “It ran counter to our self-image as a country, that we were always on the cutting edge and the Soviet Union was still something of a technological backwater.”

What followed was a period of national soul-searching that resulted in major increases in spending on scientific education and research. Jim Lewis, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the most important part of the federal response to Sputnik was probably the National Scientific Education Act.

“It created a whole generation of scientists and engineers,” Lewis said. “And we’ve lived off that bulge, that big pile of scientists and engineers that were created through the last few decades. These guys are just hitting retirement now and they’re going out of the work force and we’re not replacing them.”

Lewis says he groaned inwardly when he heard the Sputnik analogy being used once again last night. Not because he doesn’t support the President’s call for investment and innovation, but because the context is different now.

“The problem with the Sputnik analogy is that Americans were afraid when they woke up and realized that the Soviets had this immense new capability that we couldn’t match,” said Lewis.

“If you can orbit a satellite, you can land a warhead anywhere in the planet. That’s what people realized and it scared them. I don’t get that sense of fear, that sense of urgency today.”

Nor is there a specific focus like Sputnik according to Cathleen Lewis of the National Air and Space Museum.

“There’s nothing as discrete as Sputnik,” said Lewis. “There’s no discernible beeping in the sky.”

And there isn’t one overarching goal like the race to put a man on the moon. Instead President Obama spoke of a variety of clean energy Apollo projects, not one dramatic unambiguous finish line. Still, Von Hardesty thinks the President’s analogy works in a broad sense.

“The country has a perceived need to kind of reorganize ourselves,” said Hardesty. “To redeploy our resources, to once again gain a momentum or cutting edge in various spheres of life, including technology.”

Hardesty said in that sense President Obama is echoing some of the same feeling that rose out of the Sputnik area. Feelings are one thing though, action is another. Hardesty wonders out loud whether the United States has the economic and popular will to mount the kind of technological effort it did 50 years ago.

Clark Boyd on Laika’s mission (Sputnik II)