Can educational ladders overcome social stratification?

Drawing on the experience of working with the People Sharing Learning organization to close the educational gap for underprivileged students, this article argues for the need to overcome social stratification through educational ladders. Changes in the way public education is assessed and the role of educational service organizations are presented as important ways to address these issues.

 

I have been working with a volunteer organization called People Sharing Learning for a year and four months since last summer. ‘People Sharing Learning’, or ‘Bannasa’ for short, is an organization that provides educational services to underprivileged children and is the largest educational volunteer organization in Korea with more than 250 students and 400 volunteers. The organization primarily aims to teach students from underprivileged communities, and while some students come to the organization voluntarily, others are sent by schools that have almost given up on them or are referred by local governments. The reason for this introduction to the organization is to tell you about my experience with it.
This semester, we had an unusual student in our class: he had been a member of an athletic team until the first semester of his sophomore year, when he had to quit due to an unfortunate accident, and as a result, he had hardly ever studied before. Naturally, his grades were terrible, and he was so disinterested in studying that he would often take pictures of the answers to problems in class.
However, after teaching for a while, I realized that he could be an excellent student if I taught him the basics. In the units that were based on previous content, he would almost always take the answer, but in the units that could be solved only with the content of the day, he would show good application and calculation skills if I made him understand the content of the day. So, I am explaining the basic contents of the unit to the student as much as possible, and although he is still learning for the first time and does not know properly, I thought that there is enough potential if I continue to teach him and build up the basic things. So, I am teaching him by calling him earlier and giving him basic education, and he is showing some results, such as showing motivation to study and not taking answers.
When I teach students at BANASA, I am surprised to see that students who were at the bottom of the class in school and were placed in an inferior class and did not receive a high level of education actually excel when I teach them the basics. These students’ grades improve while attending BANASA, and they naturally enjoy studying and work harder, gradually mastering their own study methods. Students who go through this process are able to continue to excel in their studies even after graduating from Bannasar in the second semester of their third year.
So why do such students end up in inferior classes at school, and why do they give up on their studies? I think the answer is because of inherited education. In fact, education up to middle and high school rarely requires too much math or understanding. Most of the content is easy to solve once you understand it, especially math, which depends a lot on whether you’ve learned it before or not.
Here’s the problem. Prior learning is education outside of the formal curriculum and is naturally influenced by a student’s home situation. However, schools don’t take this into account, and instead divide students into favorable classes based on their current grades, so students who are placed in inferior classes don’t feel like studying. In order to categorize students in the first place, there needs to be a way to accurately determine their current academic performance so that the education can be tailored to their needs. Currently, however, public education is based solely on test scores, and there is no customized education for the better and worse students, making it a demotivating system.
The impact of this situation is directly related to social stratification. The entrance rate to SKY, a prestigious university, is overwhelmingly higher among high schools in Gangnam-gu than in other areas, and the difference between the wages of children whose parents have a college degree and those whose parents have a high school diploma is 24.4%, even if their SAT scores are the same.
I believe we need an “education ladder” to break this stratification. The differences between the classes start when they enter school, and we need to make it easier for individuals to overcome them, if not eliminate them. One way to do this is to change the way public education is evaluated to focus on school classes so that private education is not necessary, and another is to use educational service organizations such as Bannassa to fill in the gaps for students who cannot afford private education. If the stratification that starts with education is broken to some extent, the inheritance of class will be reduced, and it will be possible to overcome it through individual effort and ability.
In other words, the “educational ladder” I am referring to is the most realistic and effective way to provide equal access to education as part of the equality of opportunity that a welfare society seeks. Examples of such educational ladders include providing educational opportunities to the underprivileged through educational volunteer programs such as Bannassa, or reducing the need for private education by changing the way public education is evaluated. Realistically, it is difficult to change the education system, but I think that if we try to make small changes in the same way as the former, it will make a big difference.
I graduated from a science high school thanks to the preparation I did at a cram school in middle school, which made it relatively easy for me to get into college. I have received a lot from society, so now I try to give back a little.