Many teachers in South Korea are protesting because a teacher died, and people believe it was because of the stress of being an educator in a country with a very demanding education system.
Upset teachers are saying they are dealing with very tough requests and even mistreatment from upset parents. They want laws to change and more safeguards to protect them.
About 200,000 people joined a protest rally on Saturday, according to the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations, which got this information from the event organizers. On Monday, around 50,000 teachers didn’t go to work and came together in the capital city to remember a teacher who passed away, as told by the organizers. This happened even though the authorities had warned them that striking would be seen as against the law.
The teacher who taught the first grade class at Seoi elementary school in Seoul passed away on the school grounds on July 18. This information was announced in August by the Education Ministry and the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, who looked into the incident. They did not give a name to the teacher.
Two days after the teacher died, the head education officer in the city, Cho Hee-yeon, said the teacher had sadly chosen to end her own life, which is a common way of saying suicide in South Korea.
Cho said the police are still looking into the matter, but admitted that teachers don’t have legal protection for their educational activities. He suggested taking special actions to give teachers more legal and institutional safeguards.
Education authorities investigated and responded to rumors on social media. The rumors included a claim that a disagreement between two students contributed to the teacher’s death.
In August, the teacher had a meeting with the parents of both students involved, according to the education vice minister. The teacher got many calls from a parent and was worried and uneasy that the parent knew their personal phone number.
However, the deputy minister also mentioned that it was still uncertain if the parent had used any mean words against the teacher.
According to the teacher’s diary and interviews with their colleagues, the investigation discovered that the teacher had a difficult student and was struggling to manage the homeroom. Additionally, the teacher had a high workload because it was the start of the semester.
The authorities didn’t give any more information about why the teacher died or what happened before it.
The death made many teachers in South Korea realize that they could no longer tolerate the lack of discipline in their classrooms. They have been afraid to enforce rules because they were scared of getting punished themselves. Many teachers have been committing suicide recently, which has made people even more angry. People have been protesting for several weeks before Monday’s strike because of these incidents.
According to government information, 100 teachers working in South Korean public schools took their own lives during the time period from January 2018 to June 2023. Most of these teachers were from elementary schools.
The information does not say what caused their deaths, and we don’t know if their work was a reason for their suicides. But a lot of people in the education field believe that a law about child abuse that was made in 2014 is to blame.
According to the law, anyone who thinks a child is being hurt can tell the authorities about it, without having to prove it. Officials might examine the accusation by going to the place where the abuse supposedly occurred, like the schools, and talking to people who are involved in the situation.
Teachers say that sometimes parents can be unfairly angry with them because they think their child has been treated unfairly. This can put their jobs at risk.
In a survey done by a Korean teachers’ union, over 60% of the 6,243 people who answered said they either had been reported for hurting a child or knew a teacher who had been reported.
A woman, who CNN isn’t naming to protect her privacy, said that the current law on preventing child abuse limits what teachers can teach and guide in the classroom.
“The woman, who claimed to be an elementary school teacher, stated that although most teachers and parents are good, there are some parents who wrongly use this law to accuse teachers of child abuse. ”
Another woman who was also part of the strike did not want to give her name. She mentioned that she has been teaching for 10 years.
“The teacher said to CNN that teaching children in the classroom is very hard because the teachers are not given the power to make decisions. ” “Even though the Child Abuse Prevention Act was made to help keep children safe, its guidelines are not clear. ”
She said that lots of teachers feel very stressed because they are afraid of being told on by upset parents, even for giving small punishments to students or other types of discipline in class.
Officials have tried to make teachers feel better by recognizing and understanding their complaints.
Cho, who is in charge of the Seoul education office, told teachers to not make Monday a chaotic day. He suggested creating a group to investigate the teacher’s death at Seoi elementary school and make sure students can still learn while also finding a way to remember the teacher who died.
However, he spoke in a friendlier way in another statement on Sunday. He said that he had heard the desperate pleas of teachers and that he would not blame anyone involved in the strike on Monday.
The ministry has made a plan to make teaching rights stronger and better protect teachers. They also want to fix the system that has caused problems for teachers. The ministry has asked the government to make laws quickly, so that they can differentiate between proper teaching and child abuse crimes.
President Yoon Suk Yeol said in a meeting on Monday that we should listen to the concerns of teachers and work hard to improve the teaching profession and make education better.
However, people who protest and teachers are saying that they will not be happy until changes are made to the law against child abuse. According to Reuters, one of the protest groups called Everyone Together As One stated that they will keep the teachers safe and make improvements to prevent any teacher from deciding to end their life.
At the school where the teacher passed away, people placed funeral wreaths and white flowers outside. They also wrote messages on sticky notes on a wall.
The protests and attention given to teacher suicides show that South Korea has bigger mental health problems and that people have been criticizing its difficult education system for a long time.
South Korea has the highest rate of people committing suicide compared to other countries in the OECD. This rate is going up especially among teenagers and young adults in their twenties, as stated by the health ministry of the country.
Many teenagers worry a lot about their education. In Korea, most students go to normal school during the day and then attend private tutoring classes in the evenings. They also study on their own until very late at night.
This stress also affects parents, who begin spending money on their children’s education from a very young age. According to the Ministry of Education, South Koreans spent 26 trillion won (about $20 billion) on private education in 2022.
In a recent survey conducted by the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations, only 23. 6% of teachers expressed happiness with their jobs. This is the lowest percentage ever recorded, as it has dropped from almost 68% in 2007. The survey included 6,751 teachers working in various educational institutions from kindergarten to universities nationwide.