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As U.S. President Obama was speaking at a High School in Oklahoma as he launched a new program aimed at giving low-income households broadband internet, he praised South Korea’s policy of paying its teachers as much as doctors.

The reason this topic was broached had to do with South Korea’s ubiquity of high speed internet access especially in the city’s capital of Seoul.

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Mr. Obama said at Durant High School he said: “Obviously, as President you travel around a lot, and you go to countries like South Korea where a higher percentage of the population has high-speed broadband- and, by the way, they pay their teachers the way they pay their doctors, and they consider education to be at the highest rung of the professions. Well, we will start falling behind those countries- which is unthinkable when we invented the stuff.”

This isn’t the first time the president has brought awareness to the ways of South Korea. Back in 2010, he cited the length of the academic year in South Korea, compared to the US. He said: “We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day. That calendar might have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea. That is no way to prepare them for a 21st-century economy.”

“In South Korea they pay their teachers the way they pay their doctors,” he said to the audience. “They consider education to be at the highest wrung of the professions.”

Interestingly enough, the Korean Federation of Teachers Association (KFTA) pointed out that significant salary disparities exist particularly between doctors and teachers.

Mr. Obama also made a similar statement back in April, and the South Korean Times clarified his statement.
They said, ” Doctors are one of the highest-paid professions in South Korea, not on par with teachers in terms of pay.”

Whether this claim by Mr. Obama is true or false, there’s no question that the South Korean education system is producing satisfying results.

SOURCE: KOREAN TIMES