Speaker: Tae Wook Ha｜Professor of Asian Life University; Principal of Korea's first national democratic school
Tae Wook Ha is a researcher and educator in democratic education. Since his teenage school experience he dreamed of changing the highly competitive Korean education culture. He decided to go to England to learn about Summerhill and took his postgraduate studies in London. After coming back to Korea, he opened the first postgraduate course dedicated to democratic education in Korea. In March 2022, he was selected as principal of the first state-funded fully democratic school, Sinnaneun ‘The exciting’ School, which he was in charge of its theoretical design in 2000.
Hello, it is a great honor to be here with you today because I first attended IDEC in 1999 at the University of Hawaii. I was a college graduate doing research on Hawaii. I met Yaacov and was inspired by his educational philosophy. Later, in 2014, my dream came true when I became the organizer of IDEC in Korea, which was a wonderful thing.
Although IDEC is relatively small in size, its impact is huge. I remember the first time I was an IDEC organizer in 2014, it was the first time Heather, the Taiwan IDEC organizer, attended, and she was also inspired by IDEC Korea and dreamed of being the Taiwan IDEC organizer. So I really want to say, if you have a dream, it will come true! We will all inspire each other to make the world a better place and create more examples of democracy!
Today I would like to talk about the case of Korea's democratic school, which has been my dream since 1999, to establish the first public democratic school in Korea! The name of the school is Sinnaneun School (which means exciting), and we believe that schools should allow learners to be passionate, to learn independently, and to see themselves through multiple eyes. So I think this is an opportunity for the future of education in Korea!
In 2020, 4 years ago, I received a call from a local educational organization. They asked me that they had a program called Harry Potter Schools, and they wanted to build a new school called Future Schools, but they didn't know how to do it, and they asked me what I was going to do.
I said that this school must be a democratic school. Because the name of the project is Harry Potter School, they kept asking me, if we go to Harry Potter School, will you teach Ridboone Rebiosa medical language? I told them that we would not be teaching Ridbone-Rebbiosa, but that there would be magic happening here!
For those of you who may not be familiar with the region of Korea, this is the capital city of Korea, Gyeonggi Province is the capital city of Korea, it is the largest and most populated region of Korea, and it has the largest education office with almost 5000 schools, from universities to high schools, the most students go to school there. I won't go into too much background information about the schools because I only have 20 minutes today, so if you want to know more, please feel free to come to 2024 IDEC Rangyang Campus to discuss!
All in all, the Ministry of Education in Gyeonggi Province has started a new school reform, but they still believe that teacher guidelines, what teachers should teach and what students should learn are important.
Because the dropout rate in Korea is very high, and if we go back to the established system, we cannot solve this phenomenon. So I insist that we need a democratic platform to give children new education.
I have learned about democratic education from my own experience. From 2005 to now, we have a long time to make this definition, what is democratic education:
We believe that young people have the right to make their own decisions about how, what, where and who they learn in any educational setting. At the same time, young people also have the right to participate in decision-making within the organizations in which they live, especially with regard to school rules.
I have learned from this definition that there are two key elements of a democratic education: firstly, the learners are their own educational leaders, they have the right to decide what to learn, how to learn, and who to learn; and secondly, the structure of the school, the decision-making process, must be democratic. This decision-making has never been practiced in Korea, perhaps partially in some schools, but we have never had a fully democratic school, even a government-funded one.
In 2020, the Department of Education provided a public study and basic design, and in 2021, we had a set of plans and were ready to open. Finally, in March 2022, the school officially opens as Sinnaneun. Last year, we opened our new building and university. This is our school logo, which was actually designed by our students. At first there was a competition to decide who would win the design rights, but in the end we decided to combine three things that were all designed by our students to create a new logo.
We are called Alternative Schools in Korea and we have the freedom to practice whatever curriculum we want to teach and learn. We want to teach and learn. So students and teachers decide what they want to learn and learn together. We are also called Future School, we are not an academic based school, a lot of academic content can be obtained from AI and the internet, we focus on how to communicate with students and how to build relationships together. We believe that relationships are the most important thing in a school, how to communicate, how to work together, and how to learn not only in the classroom. As Yaacov says, we need to live in the community of a democratic society, not just learn. So a school can create this kind of living situation, where we have 90 students, from 13 to 19 years old, and in such a small community we can connect, communicate, get to know each other and deepen our relationships.
We believe that curriculum should be created, not provided. Schools provide students with some school-wide curriculum, and as students grow, they need a core curriculum that is important to their lives. As you can see, in the horizontal line, students create their own, blended curriculum, and they do a lot of different projects and individual programs. At first they don't know what to do, their path is narrow and their choices seem limited, but after a while they begin to learn, discover and know themselves in order to enrich their lives even more, and eventually they can create their own curriculum.
So our curriculum is self-directed, community-based, and geared towards change and creation, and we base all of our programs on these philosophies in order to energize our students. So we've been asking, if a student wants to learn soccer, how can they learn to learn autonomy, interact with people, and create some change in this soccer program?
What I've learned from IDEC is that we're a democratic community, so in our school, even if I'm the main teacher in the school, all the decisions are based on the school community. We have school meetings where students can be members of different committees and they can run the school themselves. Of course, it's not easy, especially since it's a government-funded public school. We have signed a four-year contract with the government, and this is my third year, with one year left. In the future, we need to find a new principal for this school. Can we find someone who fully understands democratic education? This is an important and not easy challenge.
At the same time, the central government of Korea, as well as the local Education Secretary, are relatively conservative in their imagination of education. They think that innovation in education must be hi-tech, so by their standards, our democratic schools are not so hi-tech. Therefore, it is very important for us to find ways to solve these problems and enable schools to have long-term experience.
Over the past two and a half years, I have seen a lot of exciting growth in our students, and they are leading enthusiastic lives. I am confident that they will continue to live the experiments of the future!
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