What enables Korea to achieve the present economic level is strength of education. The brand of Korean society that can be felt by the slogan of "Dynamic Korea" stems from education.
However, one deplorable thing is that the inequality phenomenon for educational chance between brackets has been becoming more serious owing to social polarization, under which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
We've heard that U.S. President Bush employed NCLB(No child left behind) policy and succeeded in achieving tangible results by helping schools regain educational function and reducing gap of marks between races.
Education fever in Korea is enormous.
The private education market volume reaches 30 trillion won annually in Korea. The expenses for private education account for 2.9 percent of GDP in Korea, compared with the OECD member countries' average of 1.3 percent.
At the time when Gangnam-gu office opened the Internet scholastic ability broadcasting station, most students did not satisfy the nation's school education, namely public education.
To enter top universities, in particular, high school students used private educational institutions for entrance to university where excellent lecturers teach, placing heavier financial burden on their parents.
As a result, the portion of expenses for private education to total expenditures of households became greater, becoming a social problem and neglecting school education.
Meanwhile, Gangnam-gu, the most advanced provincial government in Korea, which possesses merits of New York, the center of financing, communication and culture in the U.S. and Boston, the center of education, judged that developing and sharing merits of its own city is favorable for city marketing.
Under the judgment, Gangnam-gu has been operating the Internet scholastic ability broadcasting where excellent lecturers teach all high school courses based on Internet as part of e-learning educational service that grafted IT technology on educational contents since June 2004.
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