OPINION: Cultural Differences

12th October, 2022, by Peter K. (G.12)

Imagine a typical day in KISJ. The bell rings. School is over. One by one, students exit the classroom. But a few students remain, holding their test grades in their hands. They are eager to raise questions, objections, and worries to their teacher—perhaps the grading wasn’t fair; perhaps there was a marking mistake; perhaps the test contained material that wasn’t covered in class; perhaps they are requesting a curve. The students and their teacher exchange heated remarks for an uncomfortable 10 minutes. Afterward, they reach a stalemate. Obviously annoyed, the students march out the classroom—or maybe the teacher tells them to leave.

For any teacher or student in KISJ, the above scenario is quite easy to come by in everyday life. It’s not uncommon to hear remarks such as “I just don’t get it” or “Can’t they understand?” from both teachers and students.

This is just one example, one manifestation, of the aloofness that characterizes many of the faculty-student relationships in KISJ. This distance is only to be expected. After all, teachers and students come from very different cultural backgrounds. The majority of KISJ’s student body is Korean while the majority of the faculty members are from the United States or Canada. Different cultures—almost as if by necessity—perpetuate subtle but profound differences in how we think and approach social and educational issues. When left ignored, these differences can lead to an ever-deepening and ever-widening mental gulf between the involved parties. Before it is too late, active efforts to bridge and cross this gulf must be made. So what are examples of such differences?

First, the educational values many KISJ teachers have in mind are different from those of their students. For instance, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2016 survey, 48% of the United States public stated that it is most important that schools teach students “to be creative and think independently” while 42% stated that it is most important that schools teach “basic academic skills and encourage discipline” (Silver). This is consistent with the trend found in Western countries, emphasizing independent and critical thinking as opposed to mere academic discipline.

By contrast, in 2018, 53% of Korean high school parents stated that “career instruction” was the most important aspect they consider in schools; 11.4% cited “educational characteristic”; 8.6 referenced “ability to send students to prestigious universities” (Lim et. al.).

We don’t need to look very far to see how these contrasting educational ideals manifest themselves in everyday school life at KISJ. Students are primarily concerned with their grades and extracurricular activities—understandably so, because, after all, they want “career instruction” which (in their minds) involves getting a good GPA and getting accepted into a successful college.

Many teachers find this situation perplexing: their focus is on learning the material and improving essential academic skills such as writing, reading, researching, etc. It’s difficult for them to truly understand the “obsession” (as many of them would say) with grades and test scores. As they see it, what’s most important is the fact that students are learning essential skills and critical thinking.

Furthermore, the Americas is sharply divided over many social and political issues that a majority of Koreans simply do not care about: racism, transgender issues, health care, abortion, gun control, etc. For instance, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, 56% of Americans consider “the affordability of healthcare” to be “a very big problem”; similarly, 48% take “gun violence” to be a “very big problem” (Doherty, et. al.). It is not uncommon to see these so-called “culture wars” find their ways into the classroom. In the United States, controversies spark around critical race theory, gender instruction, school shootings—just to name a fewview. Such examples are not found in Korea. To be clear, I am not saying that any of these is not a problem in Korea—indeed, some very much are. But it is to say that Korean culture is not fixated on it. So when teachers comment on these sensitive social issues that concern Americans in KISJ, Korean students are unable to truly understand what their teachers are saying.

In addition, it’s also important to note how different the ‘teacher-student’ relationship is conceptualized in Korean culture and in countries such as the United States. Korea, a country in which Confucian tradition exerts strong historical and cultural significance, age-based hierarchy is a strong influence on how teachers interact with students. ‘Friendships’ cannot form between teachers and students, and other forms of close personal relationships are discouraged. All of this is rather foreign to teachers from American backgrounds.

When all of this is put together, what results is a strong aloofness that forms between faculty and students. Students and teachers find themselves in uncomfortable, frustrating debates about grades. Teachers may feel that the students are not sensitive enough to important social issues while students will feel that teachers are ‘going on’ about things that have little to do with their lives. Teachers may feel that their students treat teachers only as ‘professional teachers’ rather than fallible, feeling human beings whereas students may feel that teachers are behaving ‘oddly’ or ‘weirdly’.

But isn’t this aloofness a natural product of the educational system worldwide? Isn’t there a divide between teachers and students everywhere, regardless of its international character? This may lead us to think that this faculty-student divide is unavoidable and that we can’t do anything about it—whether that be in KISJ or anywhere else. While it is true that this divide is present in all schools, as we have seen, it is particularly exacerbated by cultural differences in KISJ specifically. It seems then all the more reasonable to at least mitigate the effect that these cultural backgrounds bring so that faculty-student relationships become normalized. Besides, if we could, shouldn’t we strive for better faculty-student relationships? Everybody knows the decisive effect that admirable teachers can have in a wandering teenager’s shipwrecked life. Why rob students of that opportunity for the meager reason that faculty-student conflicts are ‘unavoidable’?

Disparities in background perpetuate and intensify the mental and cultural gap between faculty and students. It is about time that members of the KISJ community acknowledge this reality and take proper measures to bridge the gap. Both the faculty and the student body must take initiatives to understand where they are coming from. Both must learn the historical realities that play into modern culture. Both must acknowledge that, although some disagreement may be inevitable, much conflict can be avoided if we were to try to hear each other out.

Works Cited

Doherty, Carroll, et. al. “Biden Nears 100-Day Mark with Strong Approval, Positive Rating for Vaccine Rollout.” (2021). Pew Research Center.

Lim, Sohyeon, et. al. “Korean Educational Development Institute POLL 2018.” (2018). Korean Educational Development Institute.

Silver, Laura. “4 Chars on How People Around the World See Education.” (2017). Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/28/4-charts-on-how-people-around-the-world-see-education/.