Korean education policy and parents expectation: case study of Korean school in Thailand

Abstract

Korean education policy had established Korean schools or KS for expatriated Korean in many countries including in Thailand. The purposes of this study are 1) to understand the characteristic of KS in terms of schools established aboard with the Korean curriculum base. 2) To understand the purpose and expectations of parents on the Korean School and see if those expectations are met. The data was collected by survey all related parties of the Korean International School (Students, teachers, and parents) 69 respondents. The data were collected from June – August 2020. The study shows that not only the Korean Government creates KS that uses the Korean core curriculum to provide the same standard education as the private school in South Korea but also wants to help students maintain their identity as Korean. We find that the students show more favoritism and comfortable over Korean culture, furthermore around 68% of the student wants to live in Korea after graduation. And the second result shows that KS parents’ expectation on KS can be divided into two groups, first the elementary level parents who seek for the good school system and trusted environment for their child to study, and the secondary level parents who are more focused on getting privilege opportunity to get into good university from residing in Thailand.