Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon and Seoul education chief Cho Hee-yeon on Monday announced their joint plan to spruce up the city’s education sector, including renovating school bathrooms, launching free school bus services and establishing more day care centers.
“Up until now, Seoul’s education system has been focusing on competition, and as a result, our children would spend most of their time doing school work and getting private education,” Mayor Park said in a press conference.
“The system made it hard for them to appreciate important values and qualities such as patience, creativity and tolerance. And in order to change this, the Seoul Metropolitan Government decided it has to work with Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education.”
One of the biggest projects of the 516 billion won ($417 million) plan, which kicks off next year, consists of selecting a total of nine districts in Seoul that are in need of support in its education sector and children with special need.
Among the nine districts, five of them will be each given 2 billion won, while the rest four will be given 300 million won to provide specialized education.
Once selected as “Education innovation district,” all of the schools in the region must have a class size of 25 or less and offer courses that satisfy the needs of the students.
“Through this innovation, we would like to raise more emphasis on collaboration and sharing, instead of competition (among our children),” Mayor Park said.
“We would also like to strengthen our education programs on humanities, arts as well as the environmental studies.”
The Seoul city government is establishing a total of six more day care centers using vacant class rooms in public schools next year, while the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education is building a total of 34 public kindergartens by 2018.
Also by 2018, the two agencies are renovating a total of 1,350 bathrooms in 675 schools, investing a total of 130.9 billion won. Teachers, parents, professional designers, and children’s psychologists will participate in the project.
A total of 132 schools in Seoul will offer free school bus services by 2018, according to the plan.
By Claire Lee (
dyc@heraldcorp.com)
