Literacy Through Photography: Improving Children’s Confidence, Self-Expression, and Creativity Through Photography Education

Section 1: The System’s Failure: Overstudying Children and Loss of Individuality

The Korean education, publicized as a system that produces students who produce perfect standardized test scores, has recently been exposed of its critical failure in fostering the humaneness within children. With the society’s emphasis on admissions to high-ranked colleges, the students and families interests naturally concentrates on the most critical admissions factor— exam scores. While this has led children of Korea to have a high education rate, leading such children to also score high on the U.S. college admissions exam, the SATs, it has also rendered the children to nothing but machines that eat, sleep, and spend the rest of their time studying.

The stress from studying, unfortunately, has grown to become fatal to the Korean youth. According to statistics, 1 youngster a day commits suicide in South Korea, with 353 youth between 10 and 19 having taken their own lives just in 2010. With this number, suicide ranked the single largest cause of death among young people in Korea, and as the highest rate among developed countries. While the OECD nations’ average suicide rate for youth is 6.5%, Korea’s is 9.4. For the reasons for making such decisions, according to a youth poll, 53.4 percent cited excessive education-related competition as the main cause for suicidal thoughts.

In Korea, children as young as second grade must deal with such massive stress of studying, as the current school system has second graders taking midterms and finals on all subjects that they study at school. While children from a couple of years back did not have to spend their elementary school days worrying about exams, the high emphasis on education has brought the examination burden upon the shoulders of eight-year-olds. Too focused on math and Korean, the school and public education system left out teaching children other, yet extremely critical materials: individuality.

Obedience to society is critical in the Korean community, a virtue that roots back to the Confucius beliefs that dominate East Asia, and it is also a virtue in Korean schools. Students are not allowed to question their teachers, as highlighted by the phrase that all children commonly are told by their parents when they leave for school in the morning: “listen to your teacher well (in common English: Do as your teacher tells you).” Cooperation and coexistence in schools and among friends is important; however, in a society where students are pushed to study extensively from a young age and thrown in the face of extreme competition, this virtue of obedience has eliminated the voice of children in the education system. The problematic education system has changed the children to become one type of human: a simple being that must listen, take in the material, and take examinations well.

In such an oppressive and stressful society, children are unable to express their own opinions, lose their individuality, and choose uniformity over creativity. This forces children to go against human nature, as human beings naturally love to express themselves. Denied to raise their own voice and told to conform to the rest of the group, children naturally lose confidence,
and also naturally lose their ability to create new ideas and rather stick to safe ones. It is no coincidence that the Korean youth have difficulty enduring the stress of extensive studying, as the education system takes away their tools to relieve their stress and protest of their burden.

This society currently has no room for children to have self-esteem, self-expression, and creativity. It only has time for children to pay attention to math equations and proper spelling so they score perfectly on exams. In order to solve this problem, I have adapted LTP as a strategy.