From the time we stepped foot in Korea, Fru and I worked hard to create a persona that did not fall easily into the English teacher stereotype. It was for good reason; I wasn't teaching but studying, and Fru was a graphic designer who had taken up a missionary assignment. Moreover, it was increasingly obvious that the perception of the foreign instructor was fading rapidly, so we had incentive to maintain our own appearance.
Why? Reports would have you believe that it was because these people, unemployed in their own countries, came over on forged degrees and spread drugs through the country and loose morals to the nation's youth--particularly females. Each of those trespasses evokes the image of a specific person or persons I knew, and for this reason we had little to do with expats in the teaching industry.
While I admit the foreigner section could use a little cleaning up, it is downright appalling how they are presented by public media. News magazine shows uncover exposes, ferret out the worst of the worst and make them the general standard. Ratings soar, citizens are enraged, and we were cautious where we ventured for a window of time.
So when I saw the story of the Canadian teacher getting six months of prison time for forging his degree, I didn't have much interest, let alone sympathy. Comments on the circuit of korean expat blogs that covered the story were much in the same line of thinking.
I feel dissonance now, however, in the discussion of Shin Jeong-ah. A Korean who falsified documents confirming her Yale doctorate (which she apparently never even started) as well as her bachelor degree (which she did undertake but did not complete) and maintained this fraud for nearly a decade, Shin is being called the female version of Hwang Woo-suk. Will she be treated the same as her Canadian counterpart in forgery? Or will she be left to lick her wounds and move on like Dr. Hwang?
It all boils down to appearance. South Korean media (why am I specifying? as if North Korea would give us a more favorable light!) will continue to prompt society's call for strict measures against foreigners to perpetuate the appearance of both the demonized foreigner and the Korean standard. Korean society will continue to let their fallen angels off in order to perpetuate the illusion of said standard.
The nail in the coffin is Lee Ji-young, who proves that much of what Korea wants can be accomplished without the accreditation it requires. So why not give them lies and do a good job instead?
“When I was offered work as the host of ‘Good Morning Pops’, KBS asked me to submit a diploma. But my predecessor suddenly quit and I had to hurriedly take over the job,” Lee said. The producer of the show says he had no reason to doubt Lee’s academic qualifications, since she performed the job without problems for seven years.
If I could give one remedy to this seemingly perpetual problem, I'd suggest interviewing people based on their merit instead of on their paperwork's indication of their merit. Encourage an environment that rewards people for personal growth, not academic eliteness. If you have such a voracious appetite for language instruction and such a scourge of unqualified instructors, why not create a program that trains ALL foreigners to a certain standard for teaching; one that you can standardize and require. Indeed, if the program was good enough, people may start coming to Korea for the training itself.
I'd love to hear what others feel about this whole issue.
