Society where parents domineer over teachers

Yang Sung-hee
The author is a columnist of the JoongAng Ilbo.

How long do we have to see these kinds of tragedies? Another young life is lost, and only now is the world moving in a hurry. The wave of condolences and rage rises on the streets. Politicians are stepping in, vowing to stop similar incidents from happening again. Only six months ago, a young female teacher committed suicide.

When did our schools become like this? Malicious complaints from parents have gone too far. Even if teachers rightfully discipline students, they often face child abuse charges. One parent reported a teacher to education authorities for child abuse just because her child was the only one in the class who didn’t receive a sticker. A student challenged a teacher for forbidding him from going to school on a motorbike, saying the teacher violated his “human rights.” A teacher was accused of child abuse for making students walk on their tiptoes for a few steps in the classroom to act out a poem in the textbook. When a student uses violence or screams in a classroom, the teacher should smile and tell the student, “Stop it, please.” Any intimidating action or physical contact can be charged with child abuse.

Some parents are asking teachers to give medicine to their children during class or help their children clean up after using the bathroom. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Others even demand that their children’s homeroom teacher should be someone from the class of a particular year from a teachers’ college, as those graduates showed high scores in the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT). Some parents demand that pregnant teachers give birth to their baby during the vacation period so that it would not affect the education of their children.

Recently, a controversy arose after a famous webtoon creator, Joo Ho-min, filed a criminal complaint against a special education teacher for child abuse against his son who has autism. The teacher was removed from the job during the criminal procedure, while other parents petitioned to complain that their children had lost a great teacher due to this trial. Joo had placed a recorder inside his son’s bag to secretly record what the teacher said in the classroom.

How have we come this far? It results from the provision of the law, which allows parents to report “child abuse” to education authorities for the slightest suspicions even though “emotional abuse” is ambiguously defined in the law. The statute serves the purpose of ending child abuse, but it ignored the special nature of the educational field and destroyed the boundaries between legitimate disciplining and abuse. It is no wonder that teachers complain that the child abuse charge is actually a charge of upsetting a student.

While lawmakers generally agree with the need to revise the law on child abuse, their views are split over the Student Bill of Rights. The government and the president’s People Power Party (PPP) want to amend the Bill of Rights — hard-pushed by liberal education office heads — for the critical loss of teachers’ authority. But the Democratic Party (DP) opposes the revision, claiming that students’ rights and teachers’ rights are not in conflict with one another.

The most regrettable thing about the recent suicide of the 23-year-old teacher was that a parent of her student told her that “you are not qualified to work as a teacher.” Many parents talk about teachers’ qualifications when they make complaints. But are they really qualified to be parents?

As teachers’ dignity and privacy must be protected, they don’t have to answer parents’ complaints 24/7. But some parents fail to understand this. They think schools are a place for “customer service,” and they demand anything anytime. They believe that their children must not suffer any loss and the rest of them must serve their kid’s happiness. Some parents fail to educate their children at home, yet demand the schools fix them as if they were customers. Teachers have studied hard and passed teachers’ exams to get qualified to teach. But did parents ever get such qualifications besides giving birth to the children?

“Parents recall their school days and have negative perceptions about teachers. But teachers no longer receive bribes from parents or give corporal punishment or discriminatory treatments to students,” a teacher stressed. Is it a conflict between students’ rights and teachers’ rights or friction between human rights of ugly parents and teachers’ authority? Some teachers wonder if the parents use the same standards at home as in school. What we desperately need is human rights education 101 upholding the spirit of putting yourself in other people’s shoes if we really want to put our strange education system back on track.