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The Busan Chapter of the Korea Teachers and Educational Workers Union excerpted a North Korean history textbook verbatim for a booklet used in a seminar for members in October last year. The textbook glorifies Kim Il-sung's anti-Japanese activities, describes the Korean War as the North¡¯s struggle to liberate the fatherland, and praises Kim Jong-il's Songun or military-first policy. It is replete with flourishes like, "The hero Gen. Kim Il-sung, revered and fervently awaited by his Korean brethren, emerged in a commanding manner," and "The people of North Korea are the happy few at last liberated from taxation for the first time in the world." The Busan chapter of the teachers' union, as it happens, also incited controversy with anti-globalization video teaching materials for the APEC summit last November that lampooned attending heads of state.
Members of union headquarters, headed by the chairman, meanwhile, are staging a sit-in in front of the central government complex in Seoul demanding an end to performance-related bonuses. They have been at it for nearly 50 days. The system, in effect since 2001, is nominal, with the gap of pay between a dedicated teacher and a bog-standard one amounting to a mere W63,000 (US$1=W955) a year. The Education Ministry has proposed widening that gap to a staggering W183,000 effective this year. Red bands fastened to their heads, the union members are having none of it. The bonuses are ¡°poisoned candies¡± inducing ¡°un-educational competition¡± among teachers, they assert. They want everyone paid the same, and some are collecting pledges to return the bonuses saying, "Let's throw away the dirty money."
When the union was inaugurated in 1989, many sympathized with its protests against the military government, expecting it to bring a breath of democracy to tightly closed schools, and hailed young teachers who pledged to boycott bribes from parents. With the passage of 17 years, however, all traces of the early days have vanished. The union spreads outmoded ideologies, turns education into a battleground, pits teacher against teacher depending on whether they are members, and disrupts every program it finds arduous or disadvantageous to it such as teacher evaluations, performance bonuses, English education at the primary level, stratifying students by academic ability, extra-curricular activities, independent private high schools and foreign-language high schools.
The teachers' union has abandoned the path of respect for teachers based on dignity, devotion and social prestige in its pursuit of ideology and vested rights. It has in effect chosen suicide as a teachers' organization. Its activities, its mindless spouting of North Korean propaganda, differ little from the terminal symptoms of other extremist movements of the past. The people should take a good long look at the union and decide what to do with it. They must brace themselves, and abandon a passivity borne of short-term concern for their own children. It is the only way to free students, teachers and education itself from the arthritic clutches of the KTEWU.
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