A child on an overseas schooling > 영어토론방

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Korean parents who send their pre-teen children to study overseas envision them becoming self-reliant, globalized talents, or at least fluent English speakers. Two recent reports show things may not always turn that way.

A week ago, a group of three teenage boys who were home on vacation beat a passer-by in his 20s to death after a trifle quarrel. It would be risky and unfair to generalize a single incident as such fistfights could have happened between any groups of rash youths. For one reason or another, however, most media took note of the fact the assailants were students attending schools abroad, India in this case.

On Tuesday, a study by the University of British Columbia said foreign students studying in Canada without their patents are far more susceptible to sexual abuse and drug use than their native counterparts. The foreign students from Korea, China and Japan were doubly sexually active and six times more likely to use cocaine than Canadian students.

``There was little I could do to stop inappropriate relationships between young girls staying at my home and far older boy friends who took them out in cars,” said its author who took part in the home-stay program for foreign students, explaining why she conducted the study.

Again, it is not always possible for parents to prevent even their own juveniles from going astray not just abroad but at home.

But the adolescents’ extreme vulnerability to aberration should never be an excuse for a hands-off policy on the part of parents and educational authorities but a reason for them to redouble care and attention, especially in a country which sent nearly 77,000 elementary school students abroad in 2009.

Overseas schooling at an early age, like everything else, has its advantages and disadvantages, so it would be best if the nation could maximize the former and minimize the latter. Unfortunately, however, there are not many things either the parents or the authorities concerned can do. Parents, especially the mothers, can stay by their children, and the government can toughen administrative supervision on overseas study brokers, and ask its foreign governments, to do the same on their own agencies.

All this brings one back to square one: The reason so many Korean children have to struggle in a foreign land by themselves and away from their parents _ poor educational system at home, ridiculed as ``rote machine” or ``exam hell,” or low efficiency compared with investment.

It’s past the time Koreans turn their educational overzeal into a more efficient system. That could be either the improvement of the public education system and/or a wider opening of the education market.

If President Lee Myung-bak could come up with a national strategy to solve the problems instead of leaving it to individuals, he will go down in history only for this.

It would not be easy, but the earlier, the better. Various social costs, including human failures, are too high to let this situation go on for long.

Excerpt from The Korea Tims
Source: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/koreatime_admin/LT/common/nview.asp?idx=1063&nmode=2

Question
1. Are you willing to send your child on an overseas schooling?
2. Overseas schooling at an early age has its advantages and disadvantages. Let’s talk about it.
3. What’s your opinion of overseas schooling at an early age? Do you agree or disagree?
 
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