I will talk about “academy colonialism.” It’s not my idea, actually. My ER2 students suggested it to me. [In what follows, note that I am “round-trip-romanizing” the names of the Korean businesses in question, to protect (somewhat) their online anonymity. Maybe, down below, I’ll explain what I mean by “round-trip-romanizing.”]
First of all, if I haven’t made it clear before: after only 6 months of existence, it turns out that RingGuAPoReom EoHagWon (my current employer, and the result of the buyout in December of the Tomorrow School-my original employer) is ceasing to exist. It’s what they call a “reverse merger” in the world of business. The parent company to the RingGuAPoReom EoHagWon has invested in a “healthier” and much larger academy business called ElBeuRitJi EoHagWon, and they are spinning off their tiny and just-started-out English academy business and merging it into this other business. So although the underlying ownership isn’t changing, RingGuAPoReom EoHagWon is being swallowed by ElBeuRitJi EoHagWon.
Naturally, the mood around work is grayish. All the students are being forced to move into a new curriculum once again, and a new environment. Our current campus will be closed completely, and the elementary-schoolers will go to one currently existing ElBeuRitJi campus, where there are already 500-odd students, and the middle-schoolers will be off to another already extant ElBeuRitJi campus, with a similar enrollment. And the high-schoolers are off in limbo somewhere, since ElBeuRitJi doesn’t do high-schoolers.
Since we can’t teach at both campuses, we teachers are being forced to make a catch-22 choice: middle-schoolers or elementary-schoolers. And with only two months left on my contract, I’m just kind of shrugging and smiling and biding my time. If the new environment is sufficiently appealing, I haven’t even ruled out the possibility of renewing, yet. Who knows?
Anyway, my ER2 students made a telling and semiotically loaded comparison in class today, when we were discussing the upcoming change. They said that RingGuAPoReom was Korea, and that ElBeuRitJi was Japan. Gavin nodded, grimly, and Tina made a disgusted face. The reference was obvious to all of us: we were discussing an act of vicious colonial conquest. Korea was conquered (“annexed”) by Japan in 1910, and suffered 35 years of brutal occupation and subjugation which left indelible scars on the national psyche. So it was no insignificant thing that they would make such a comparison. Given the cultural baggage, I’d never had dared put such a concept on the table.
When we first learned of the impending absorption of the academy, I had made the comment to Ryan that it was really mostly unfair to the children. Most children crave stability, and require it to thrive, and forcing two massive changes in less than a year – including changes to everything from curriculum and physical location to teaching staff and curriculum – was essentially going to prove psychologically traumatic for them. I mentioned the names of several timid and behaviorally challenging elementary-schoolers as case-in-point. Some of them had taken several months to get over the shift away from the Tomorrow School.
The ER2 students comments, today, confirmed that these students are neither ignorant of what’s going on, nor are they in any way neutral observers: they clearly have strong opinions and feelings about it, and I suspect very little attention will be paid them.
Footnote, RE my practice of “round-trip-romanizing.” Most of these English academies (어학원=EoHagWon), here, have English-based names, naturally. But in most internal documentation, and even in advertising literature, these English-based names are hangeulized (konglishified, i.e. rendered in the Korean alphabet). If you re-romanize the resulting hangeul following the official hangeul-to-roman rules, you get something that is generally unrecognizable as English at all, and in any event no longer recognizable as the original English names of the academies in question.
An example. Let’s say I have an academy called Happy School. I can hangeulize this as 해피스쿨, and then re-romanize this to HaePiSeuKul. See? It renders the name of the school “anonymous” to search engines, which are not in the least sophisticated when it comes to questions of inter-alphabetic transliterations. I think.
