Pop-up: Publish a dictionary of school/class system (학교 교육 시스템 사전)

When I was home on break in Korea, I watched a TV documentary about a special educational system implemented in Ireland which showed a rapid and significant economic, and national, growth. This documentary, 15-year-old's Class of Your Dream, aired on MBC is designed to be trilogy which deals with topics of eduction: the first is "Just play one year of K-12 (1년쯤 놀아도 괜찮아)," the second "Just at the bottom of class (꼴찌라도 괜찮아)," and the third "Just imagine weird ideas (엉뚱한 상상도 괜찮아)." While just half-mindedly watching the program for a moment, it occurred to me that I publish a dictionary of different types of school/class systems to which any faculty staff as well as students of all grades can refer.

My idea is that the government builds several types of schools which implement different school systems that lots of people are already informed of and that they would like to attend. Then students will pick out one theme school themselves after consulting this dictionary/school guidebooks I will publish. In actuality, I need to publish both dictionary and school guidebook. Dictionary is necessary for educators and government officials to find out how various yet innovative school systems there can be worldwide and sort out a few of them that are most appropriate and appealing to the people of the country. School guidebook is for students and parents to look up which choices they have when they get to decide which school to go in the next level--just like a college guide published by Kaplan or Princeton Review.

To realize my idea, I will need to research as many different schools as possible around the world and classify the themes/systems. For example, in Japan and Korea, as far as I know, they have standardized educational systems that almost all schools in those nations must follow. There are some countries like those two having nationalized systems while there are countries like the United States that do not have a particularly standardized system but varied program according to each state. So it is apparently an indefinite amount of work but still seems to be able to be accomplished.

So I will describe each different system - I'm not decided about whether to enumerate it alphabetically or in some other clustered way - in terms of special, novel aspects of the system. As if I advertise each educational system, I'll just show the special things at first: e.g., having one year a break period from academics without any exam in freshman year/4th grade in junior-high school (Irish educational system has a six-year junior-high school after elementary school.). After shedding a light on an outstanding feature of a system, I will describe how it is feasible and actually being carried out by illustrating a real model school. I will pronounce what this system is exactly and what a model school is doing in detail continued from the special feature at the first. I will also tell drawbacks concretely as well. Then I will include comments and reviews from actual teachers and students at the model school and invite education experts to evaluate/comment on it. At the end of each system description, I will put contact information of a model school so that anyone interested can ask and get answered from promptly.

*Pictures from iMBC