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President-elect Lee Myung-bak¡¯s approval rating has reportedly declined to the 60 percent level, more than 10 points lower than the 70 percent rating he enjoyed just after his election victory. And just around 50 percent of the public are saying that the president elect¡¯s transition team is doing a good job.
This is the result of the Transition Committee failing to distinguish between what it ought to do and what it should leave alone, while doing a poor job even at what it ought to do and getting too greedy. Strengthening English teaching is a job for the new government to boost Korea¡¯s competitiveness and ease the financial burden many suffer from having to send their children to private crammers to complement poor public education. Everyone would welcome measures aimed at strengthening English teaching if they offered genuine opportunities for children of underprivileged families to learn English properly at public schools. But the result is quite different.
That¡¯s because of the clumsy approach to dealing with the plan. It would have been another thing if the Transition Committee got the help of an expert on the matter, who would have used reliable data to convince the public of the poor level of English spoken by our students and how this could be resolved through government support, which in turn would ease the financial burden on parents. But the committee out of the blue announced plans for English immersion classes, triggering alarm bells among parents who began to worry about having to spend more money on private English lessons so their children would survive those new classes.
The committee not only botched things it was supposed to do but tackled things it had no business addressing. It meddled in various areas, from lowering mobile phone fees by 20 percent, cutting fuel costs by 10 percent, lowering highway toll fees during rush hour, giving business officials priority in using VIP lounges at airports, to reviving the system of awarding extra points in public service exams to those who served in the military, free admission to museums, affordable housing and even ways to spell words of foreign origin. The committee is like a supermarket of policies.
There have also been constant problems with officials at the committee. These embarrassing incidents resulted from the committee appointing around 600 people who served in Lee¡¯s election camp as advisors and policy researchers.
As its name implies, the job of the Transition Committee is to look at the status of the outgoing government¡¯s policies. If the committee had remained faithful to this role, it would not have faced criticism. But officials in the committee lived in the illusion that they were already a government. It was obvious that the committee was under pressure to show something to the public ahead of April¡¯s National Assembly elections.
The president elect reportedly said this reaction from the public shows it has grown tired of the Transition Committee talking too much about its plans before acting on them. If the public is tired of the new government before it is even launched, that is a serious problem. The new government would be best advised to forget about mapping out a new direction based on the activities of the Transition Committee, and look for ways to change the atmosphere and morale within the new government once it is inaugurated.
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