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June 18, 2009
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| JEJU - Jeju, Korea’s most popular tourist destination for its warm climate and beautiful scenery, is bracing itself for bigger fame - through English education. Jeju Special Self-Governing Province in Jeju Island yesterday broke ground for the nation’s first district to be solely devoted to English education, drawing not only domestic but also international students beginning in 2011. The ceremony was held on 3.8 square kilometers (936.5 acres) of land in Daejeong-eup, Seogwipo City - around half the size of Yeouido, an island next to Han River in Seoul. The Jeju Global Education City, its tentative title, will accommodate 12 elementary, middle and high schools using English as their main language. It will include an English education center, residences, hospitals and other living facilities. Three schools will open in March 2011. Completion of the remaining nine schools and of the entire city is scheduled to take another four years. “When fully established in 2015, the Jeju Global Education City is expected to save Koreans from spending between $324 million and $540 million a year overseas, equivalent to the annual amount spent by 9,000 students leaving Korea for study abroad,” said Park Jae-su, an official in charge of the project at the Land Ministry. In the long term, the city will attract foreign students from neighboring countries such as China and Japan, who want to learn English in an international environment, he added. Around 1,700 government officials and Jeju residents, including Chung Jong-hwan, minister of land; Kim Tae-hwan, governor of the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province; and Byon Jong-il, chief executive of Jeju Free International City Development Center, attended the ceremony in the afternoon. The key focus of the education city will be schools. The revised bill on the Jeju Special Autonomous Province that passed at the National Assembly on March 3 has laid the ground for the 12 schools there to have more expansive freedom than other schools in management and curriculum. There will be no restrictions on the qualifications for applicants and no limit on the ratio of domestic students to foreign peers, although the schools will take the format of conventional international schools: Except for Korean language and literature and social science, all subjects will be taught in English. The annual tuition will be half or one-third of those at schools abroad - between 13 million won ($10,322) and 30 million won. The revised bills will also allow private enterprises and foreign investors to set up and manage schools there. In April, the city signed a memorandum of understanding with North London Collegiate School, a U.K.-based school for girls, to establish a school. Discussions for further partnership with other businesses and institutions are currently under way, according to Jeju Free International City Development Center. The English education center will be responsible for developing English education policies, related curriculum and teacher training. It will also run short-term English camps for elementary and middle school students and offer language training courses for adults and university students, thus garnering some of the demand presently absorbed by universities and private institutes in the United States, Canada, Australia and some other English-speaking countries. To create a more English-friendly environment, the city intends to adopt universal administrative units such as “street and town” as replacements for “gun [county] and gu [district].” Also, the buildings and other facilities will be modeled after those in English-speaking countries. The city plans to hire native English speakers as shop owners and salesmen. The city will also build 5,800 housing units capable of accommodating up to 23,000 people. The global education city project will cost a total of 1.8 trillion won, with the government paying 482.4 billion won and private investors the rest. By Seo Ji-eun [spring@joongang.co.kr] |
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