Teachers pounding students.

There's been so many nasty little stories in the news lately, it's hard to keep up and write intelligent posts. It's been hard to write any sort of post lately, as blogger was apparently blocked for the past couple of days. Everything seems to be normal as of about 5 p.m. today, but almost everyone I've read in the Korean blogosphere was affected by it.

Anyway, I read on Lost Nomad today about a nasty beatdown given to a high school student by his teacher. Apparently the student and his friends had been chronicly tardy, and the teacher had had enough of his lateness and his lies. So the teacher beat him with what the Chosun Ilbo calls a bamboo sword, and what is probably the long rod they use in kendo. A student captured the incident on his camera, and I've preserved it on youtube here. As written in the Chosun Ilbo article, "The principal of the school said, "The teacher apologized to the two students who were punished and the other students in the class. I am sorry for causing controversy and I have given the teacher a warning." Occidentalism posted the link to this other video, which shows a teacher walloping a student in the face.



Corporal punishment happens all the time here. I can't say I'm opposed to it most of the time. It made me uncomfortable to see it in my former hagwon, largely because I didn't think the teachers had any authority to hit students, most of whom had better English skills than their teachers (who could do little more than dictate from a grammar book and press "play"). But you can see it happening during every between-class break, and my coteachers this year have told me to hit students who are disruptive. Today for instance a student got swatted in the butt with a stick by a male homeroom teacher, and later I saw a female teacher pinning (sp?) a male student against a door with her hand on his throat, to name but two examples. The most outrageous example I've seen happened two or three weeks ago. One of the teachers brought two girls into the teachers' office and punched one of them in the head twice---closed fist, pretty hard, but not as hard as this video circulating on Youtube---for having a skirt that was a little too short. That obviously was a very extreme example, and I don't enjoy seeing things like that---in school or out---but I don't think there's any harm done by your runofthemill smack on the palm or on the backside. It sure isn't any less effective than a 30-minute detention, or whatever goes on back home.

This would be upsetting news at any time, but it seems a bit more troubling to me now, as foreign teachers are currently targets of a moral panic aimed at wiping out unqualified, dangerous, AIDS-carrying pedophiles. After seeing scenes like this, and reading about the stepfather found not guilty of molesting his 11-year-old stepdaughter (see yesterday's post), and reading about the high school teachers who took students to prostitutes while touring China, and reading about the middle school girl held prisoner in Gwangju, forced into prostitution, and raped by over 800 men (please read this if you already haven't), it makes me wonder why all the outrage is consistently aimed at foreign teachers. I've already refused the latest battery of background checks, and am prepared to continue to do so. I'm sick of people like Jason Lim who invoke every sort of stereotype to defame foreigners and hold them accountable for every shortcoming of the English edutainment business. I stand by my earlier statement that I am"shocked to see a culture that is at once so eager to learn a foreign language, yet so quick to slander its speakers."