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Lee unveils hands-off education policy
By Yoo Cheong-mo
SEOUL, Jan. 22 (Yonhap) -- President-elect Lee Myung-bak's transition team said Tuesday his incoming administration will completely eliminate state intervention in local college entrance examinations by 2012, as part of his deregulatory reform drive.
The team said that local universities and colleges will be given full autonomy in recruiting new students in five years, as Lee's incoming government will remove state controls over their entrance examinations in three stages.
Heavy government intervention in the educational sector has suppressed creative and elitist education by imposing unnecessary learning burdens on local students, while snowballing private educational expenses have triggered severe income polarization and other social problems, team officials said.
The proposed liberalization of the educational system reflects the next president's bid to revitalize economic growth and ease social polarization by applying the principles of the free market, autonomy and competition to the problem-ridden educational sector, the officials explained.
In the first stage of the liberalization road map disclosed by Lee's transition team, the incumbent government's college entrance exam system that disregards numerical scores of the state-run College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) and categorizes several hundreds of thousands of college hopefuls into just nine grades will be scrapped.
The government of President Roh Moo-hyun introduced the controversial system last year in a bid to discourage elitist education and schools in favor of more egalitarian higher education.
The second stage calls for reducing the number of CSAT exam subjects to less than five to reduce the learning burden on students and the third stage will give full autonomy to universities and colleges.
"The new educational policy is aimed at getting rid of heavy state interventions and helping students fully develop their academic potential and creativity," Lee Kyung-sook, chairwoman of the presidential transition team said in a news conference.
She also stressed that the new government is also determined to drastically reinforce English education for domestic students over the next five years.
"A more competitive educational course for foreign languages will help normalize public education and help parents reduce their private educational expenses. We'll benchmark foreign countries which promote public usage of English," said the chairwoman.
ycm@yna.co.kr
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