The End Of The Party?
October 14th, 2008 by Joel McConvey | Comment »
JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA — One very niche effect of the global economic meltdown has been a growing sense, among the ESL community in Korea, that the English teaching gravy train may be either congealing or going off the rails, depending on which metaphor you prefer.
In recent weeks, the South Korean won has taken a pummeling worthy of Jake La Motta, which means sending money home from Korea to pay off debts or stash in savings accounts is now a lesson in the more painful side of international currency exchange and the ways it can screw you. When I arrived in Jeju-do in December 2006, my monthly paycheque of 2.2 million won transferred home would turn into more than $2,200 Canadian. Today, I get under $2,000.
That’s not so bad, but the situation is much worse for American teachers, whose cheque now works out to about $1,680 US. With the free housing and the paid airfare, the ESL jobs here still offer an undeniably attractive deal, but for those who are here strictly for the money, it’s looking less and less like the savings coup it’s been for the last nine or ten years. If things get worse — as in 1997 Asian economic crisis worse — there’s a chance many money-conscious teachers won’t see any reason to continue working here, and just as good a chance that many travel-hungry teachers will realize that if they’re going to be making crap money, they might as well be teaching somewhere they can buy weed and pancakes that aren’t served with kimchi and clams.
If anything like this happens — a scarcity of new teachers, a total financial faceplant — it will be interesting to observe just how much value Koreans put on English Language education. It’s safe to say public school programs will remain unaffected, but hagwons are expensive, and easy costs to cut in lean times; take little Bum-joon out of his afternoon kindergarten class, and you instantly save a few hundred dollars a week, often more.
Conversely, if hagwons want to continue drawing even semi-qualified teachers from the West, they may have to sacrifice profits to keep the carrot on the stick from going rotten, but there’s a point at which it just isn’t a viable business model anymore. If you’re spending $1,000 on fuel surcharges to get your foreigner from Australia to Busan, on top of her ticket and bonus and housing costs, you’re looking at a pretty high price to pay just to have someone stand in front of a class of uncomprehending six-year-olds and sing “C is for Cookie.”
For a long time, there’s been talk of moving towards a system in which foreigners aren’t as crucial to the equation — one in which the bulk of ESL education is done in the public system, by Koreans who have sufficient English skills to serve as English immersion teachers. One assumes the hope is that the current generation of kids being shuffled through the hagwons will emerge much better equipped with English than the previous generation, but the dream seems somewhat naïve to me, since I still regularly run into situations like the one in which I asked a thirteen-year-old student of mine how many years she’s been studying English for, and she held up eight fingers.
Which is to say, although I’m reaping its benefits as we speak, I’m not at all sure the collapse of the hagwon system would be a bad thing. South Koreans spent at least $10 billion on private English education in 2006, and my guess is that less than 50 per cent of that was money well spent. If Lee Myung Bak, hobbled though he has been by a series of gross miscalculations at the outset of his presidency, can make good on his promises and buttress the public school system with highly-trained Korean nationals, it would save the Korean people a lot of money, put a lot of shysters out of business and almost certainly, in the long run, be more effective in actually getting kids to learn functional English — if only because Korean kids are ninety-five percent more inclined to listen to even the most nonthreatening Korean than they are to a white guy holding a billy club and a bullwhip threatening them with death by slow liquidation if they don’t remember where to put the definite article.
And what of the great slacker dream of teaching English in Asia? It will live on, to be sure, although (economic crisis or no) the hub will eventually shift to China and Southeast Asia, as this area of the world becomes wealthier.
If the whining of overpaid expats who will now have to find another way to avoid brand-name Adulthood elicits little sympathy, it has a lesson to 
teach everyone embroiled in the current financial shitstorm, doing their own fretting and nail-chewing. One of the most interesting contrasts I’ve been presented with recently is between the speculation surrounding the ESL situation and the story, relayed to me through a friend, of a mechanic who works out in Seongsan, a coastal village on Jeju’s eastern tip. When the economy came up in their conversation, the mechanic — a man in his mid-forties — began talking about his childhood, during which many of the things we (and he) now think of as essentials were simply not available to rural Jejuites. The guy had no fridge, no flush toilet, no electricity until he was twelve. He is part of a generation of people who have watched this island turn from a backwater swamphole into a highly-constructed tourist oasis, and who knows, in a pinch, how to survive for a couple decades with none of the modern conveniences we cling to like scared puppies.
The great looming fear hovering over the world’s current problem surely has to do with wealth, but when you start seeing web features about the Great Depression pop up everywhere, you know a lot of people are also thinking darker thoughts about joblessness and hunger and dust bowls and that scene from The Road where the man and his son hide from a gang of gas-masked cannibals trolling the empty cities for prime cuts of toddler. Yet, for this Jeju mechanic (and, for that matter, most of the people in the world) it’s not really a stretch at all to imagine a life dramatically changed by poverty. It’s not appealing, certainly, but it also doesn’t come with the same apocalyptic dread that serious financial troubles seem to conjure like mushroom clouds in the minds of comfortable North Americans. (Noted that there are plenty of desperate North Americans, too.)
Contained within this idea is an insight — that we in the West, at least most of us, are incredibly rich — that’s admirably communicated by Mr. lorax2013, a kind of YouTube prophet/guru that a friend put me onto the other day, who manages to put things into a refreshingly optimistic and thoughtful perspective. No matter how bad it gets, for spoiled English teachers, harried investors, the North American middle class, the Korean education network, or George Will, the chance that most of us are going to have to dig a hole to crap in anytime soon is still very slim. So don’t panic — market crisis or no, you’re still sitting pretty.
