Korea’s bold attempts to create a special English speaking school district in which only English is allowed may revel the intrinsic weakness of Korean society. First, they do not want to have such a district in main land — not-in-my-back-yard attitude or just simply lack of lands. Second, they like to domesticate students with English without giving away kimchi mentality. Third, some school specifically seems to exclude Japanese. Well, they want to cultivate the environment peppered with global culture with Asian face except Japanese. — That is fine and the number of Japanese American is relatively small as well and if Japanese-Americans want to go to this Korean school is questionable.
“There is an expressed desire in Korea to seek the benefits of a ‘Western’ or ‘American’ approach to pre-collegiate education,” said Ted Hill, headmaster of the Chadwick School, whose Songdo campus has been deluged with applicants to fill the 30 percent of slots reserved for Korean students. The balance of the student body will be recruited from expatriate families living in South Korea and China.”
For them it is just a business opportunity, but hey, others want it.
Western Schools Sprout in South Korea
They like to cultivate English skills without compromising Korean identity, culture and pride.
I hope they will not repeat the failures of American universities in Japan.
バブル期の遺跡『消滅大学』
”日本にいながらアメリカに留学できるわけです。
当時のキャッチフレーズは『私、日本にいながらアメリカの大学通うの!』だそうです。”
http://home.owari.ne.jp/~shima60matsuo-s/newpage60.html
Osaka governor has already planed this type of project in Itami and it might be a good bet. To attempt to create a similar “virtual international district” from scratch, one must realize that “nation building” is not cheap nor easy. So the governor’s idea might be better than the Korean project since Itami is more attractive than a developing island.
One difference is that Korean started it already and Japan is just thinking about it. Or it already failed similar American university nightmare, though this phenomena was fundamentally different.
If Japan and Korea want to compete globally then they have to come up with universally acceptable values shared by all ethnic groups. They are both afraid of wider scale immigration even though they see its benefits. “Globally compete” means that excelling in hardware as well as content creation and accommodation that can be accepted by many people who can use as well as expand it as their own.
Xenophobic people like to focus on the failure of immigration in the US and France, but they totally ignoring the contribution of immigrants in these countries. Also Detail analysis of human genome indicates that ethnic puritanism is a joke. Xenophobic people idealize the past when only a pure blood-linage flourished, but such people will be disappointed to find that the population of modern human might have been down to about 600 during the last ice age. So Japanese far right wing may need to accept their neighbors as brothers and sisters.