Class sizes vary greatly among Seoul schools
Written by Writer on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
Class sizes vary greatly among Seoul schools
The Korea Herald
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The average number of students per class varied greatly among elementary schools in Seoul, ranging from 15.5 to 43.4, according to the city’s education authorities.
This is largely because despite the shrinking number of students in the city center, it is not easy to integrate downtown schools with established histories. The student population surged, however, in redeveloped residential districts as more families moved there.
An average of 43.4 students study in one class at Yeokchon Elementary School in the northwestern district of Eunpyeong, nearly triple the number at Gyodong Elementary School in downtown Jongno-gu.
This means a Yeokchon teacher has to take care of 2.8 times more students compared to a Gyodong teacher. The number of students per teacher is a commonly used yardstick for a school’s quality of education.
Yeokchon Elementary School has some 3,253 students, more than 26 times the number of students in Gyodong. But it has only 75 classes. Gyodong, on the other hand, has only 124 students divided into eight classes.
Soongshin (in Jongno-gu), Namsan (in Jung-gu), Yongsan, Eunnam (in Seocho-gu) and Gongjin (in Gangseo-gu) elementary schools also had less than 20 students per class.
Eight elementary schools including Yeokchon, Haenghyun (in Sungdong-gu), Mokdong (in Yangchon-gu), Dunghyun (in Gangseo-gu) and Bonghyun (in Gwanak-gu) had an average of more than 40 students per class.
Many observers suggest moving or integrating small schools rather than spending tens of billions of won to build new ones, pointing to the decline of overall student population.
The number of elementary school students continued to fall from 762,967 in 2001 down to about 660,000 last year.
The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, however, plans to build five new elementary schools next year in Eunpyeong, Gangseo, Yangchon and Sungdong.
“The city has no plans to move or merge schools like Gyodong or Soongshin, because the number of students will eventually grow again with the mayor’s plan to revamp downtrodden commercial quarters downtown,” said Chung Im-gyun, a spokesman of the metropolitan office of education.
“The birth rates have also recently started to pick up.”
Having opened in 1894, Gyodong was Korea’s first primary school and alma mater of many influential Koreans including former president Yoon Bo-sun. Soongshin opened in 1959.
Several elementary schools in remote provincial regions have been closed or merged as they were emptied out, but it has never happened so far in the capital.
By Kim So-hyun
(sophie@heraldm.com)
