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By Chyung Eun-ju, Park Si-soo
English has been a "fixture" of the curriculum at primary and secondary schools for many years. Students have to learn English as a mandatory subject to graduate and nobody has challenged the policy amid globalization in which English is increasingly considered another primary language.
A provincial education office recently challenged the policy, arguing that studying English should be optional, at least in rural areas where more students were in multiracial families.
The Daegu Office of Education suggested last week that the Ministry of Education remove English from the list of mandatory subjects -- English, Korean and math. The office said the removal, if implemented, will make it easier for students, especially from multiracial families, to learn other languages at school, which will help bolster the nation's linguistic diversity and international competitiveness.
An estimated 100,000 students are growing up in multiracial families nationwide. In Daegu, there are nearly 3,000 students whose mother or father is foreign-born, accounting for 1 percent of the total. Most came from Asian neighbors such as Vietnam, China, Japan or the Philippines.
"There are many students with a parent from Vietnam, but they don't speak Vietnamese at all," a Daegu education office official said. "While they spend many hours studying English because it's a mandatory subject, they have little time to learn Vietnamese, even though they live with a ‘native Vietnamese teacher' at home. That's an irony."
An official in the ministry's policymaking division told The Korea Times that no formal petition has yet been filed by the Daegu office.
"No petition about the issue has been filed formally," the official said, asking not to be named. "Even if the petition was filed, it would be difficult to make any change to the existing policy because English is an important part of the curriculum. Any change to this would require an extensive pros and cons discussion covering the whole gamut of teachers and experts in public education."
