South Korean teachers are in the middle of a wide protest, sparked by the slew of unfortunate suicides of school teachers over the last few weeks. Teachers have been reporting incidents of receiving late-night calls and complaints from parents regarding their manner of disciplining students over unacceptable behaviors, which have led to severe distress and incapacity to handle their classes properly. A middle school teacher narrated how her students, only having recently returned to face-to-face classes after the pandemic, tend to forget to bring important materials to class, even after she reminded them several times. The teacher resorted to making those students stand during class as a punishment, which did more harm than good — they deliberately disrupted the class and disrespected the teacher even more. What’s worse, a parent reported the teacher for potential child abuse, and she was immediately suspended without formal investigation. Her attempts to settle things with involved parties were likewise blocked. This, among numerous other stories, is a reason why teachers are on the streets, demanding protection and assurance of their rights as they slowly lose their authority and even risk facing legal charges against parents.

This echoes a similar landscape I witnessed among my middle school teachers when I was still studying in the Philippines. Having come from a public school, our teachers were arguably very distressed — unfurnished classroom equipment, lack of resources, and large classroom sizes are just some of the hurdles I’ve seen them face. And yet, strictness and authority are two main concepts that are always emphasized in most of our classes. I remember having forgotten to write the date in an assignment despite my teacher always reminding us to habitually write it. She enforced a rule that anyone who forgets it will get a score of -10 on the corresponding homework. I unfortunately got the cut, which pulled down my grade for that quarter by several notches. And for a class with students getting near-perfect scores on every quiz and homework, my class rank went down by at least 10 places. I was obviously devastated; if the purpose of that rule enforcement was to encourage students to be more responsible with class rules, I’d frankly say it wasn’t helpful. I still forgot some rules in other classes, and I still wasn’t as meticulous as my teacher would have hoped. And a lot of my classmates were the same — after all, it’s really difficult to instill perfect discipline in a very young child. But it surely made me remember why the particular rules were important and the essence of following authority. If anything, the consequences enlightened rather than scared us.

The situation in South Korea, however, is admittedly tricky. Everything you do is practically designed for college admissions, from the tiniest margins of your GPA to your extracurriculars and behavioral records. Not to mention, the cutthroat national CSATs make or break your chances of getting to a good college. Adding to that is the unfamiliarity of the recent generations of students to the face-to-face lectures, so much pressure piles up on the rather inexperienced students to respond properly to social classroom situations. And considering that penalties may potentially tarnish a student’s otherwise perfect college application portfolio, you can likewise connect the dots on why some parents would bend over backwards to prevent their kids from receiving even the smallest punishments. 

But the current landscape that teachers in South Korea are threading already shows that this has gone way out of hand — so much so that they find it difficult to create a conducive classroom environment for learning. And while the flaws of the country’s education system may be contributing to the problem, the teachers still need to be able to teach properly, and this won’t happen with a student population that cannot be controlled. I recognize the imperfections of the typical classroom setting wherein all students have different optimal methods and paces of learning, and it would be ideal if we could accommodate all of these differences. But realistically, a teacher could only do so much, and there aren’t many alternatives to the current setup. We can only make do with what we have for now and trust the professionals who have devoted their time and pledged to perform their duty of educating the youth. I believe we should at least allow teachers the freedom of creativity in their teaching methods, as they are the best ones to navigate our world’s imperfect education systems. And if the methods they know best entail incorporating stricter rules and punishments within their classrooms, then we should grant them the liberty to employ them, provided that these are reasonable and law-abiding.