Teachers here are required to get Master's degrees as well. I'm staring at my useless Master of Science in Teaching right now. And delay school starting? If we had decent parents at home as a rule, we wouldn't be in the predicament we are now. School needs to start even sooner to make up for the shortcomings of parents as it is. I can't tell you how many times I called home and--if I even got a response at all--was clearly given the message that the parent/guardian did not care about the child's education _at all_.
It's interesting to ponder the fact that the South Korean education reform was led by United States researchers<p>"By the late 1960's America was again in crisis. Not only was the country involved in another war, but the nation's schools were unable to elicit the achievement from learners it anticipated. Grant Venn argued that since only 19% of first graders complete a bachelor or arts degree, that the current educational system is only serving the advantaged minority of schoolchildren. To counter this trend Robert Morgan proposed to conduct an experiment with an "organic curriculum" which would to incorporate into the educational system the best instructional practices identified through research. Accepted in 1967 the proposal by the US Office of Education, the project was dubbed "Educational Systems for the 1970's", or ES'70. Morgan engaged an array of experts in the field of learning, cognition, and instructional design to contribute to the project and carried out multiple experiments in a variety of settings. Of these was Leslie Briggs, who had demonstrated that an instructionally designed course could yield up to 2:1 increase over conventionally designed courses in terms of achievement, reduction in variance, and reduction of time-to-completion – this effect was four times that of the control group which received no training. In 1970, Morgan partnered with the Florida Research and Development Advisory Board to conduct a nation-wide educational reform project in South Korea. Faced with the task of increasing the achievement of learners while at the same time reducing the cost of schooling from $41.27 per student per year Morgan applied some of the same techniques as had been piloted in the ES'70 project and achieved striking results: an increase in student achievement, a more efficient organization of instructors and course content, an increased teacher to student ratio, a reduction in salary cost, and a reduction in yearly per student cost by $9.80." (<a href="http://edutech-05.blogspot.com/2008/03/brief-history-of-instructional-design.html" rel="nofollow">http://edutech-05.blogspot.com/2008/03/brief-history-of-inst...</a>)<p>As a result, many countries continue to send students to Florida State's Instructional Systems Design program.<p>It's sad that our bureaucracy prevents us from benefiting from our own research.