CHUNCHEON, South Korea — “Is the Frankenstein monster human?” a teacher asks students at the Toegye public elementary school in Chuncheon city, some 50 miles east of Seoul, as they discuss Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.

“I think we can call it a human being with no soul,” ventures student Ma Yeonwoo.

The Toegye school has adopted the “Great Books” educational model used by St. John’s College, whose main campus is in Annapolis, Md.

The class’s discussion then shifts to whether artificial intelligence is human.

“No,” Ma Yeonwoo responds, because humans created AI, and although it is intelligent, it “has no creativity.”

In the “Great Books” model, teachers do not lecture, they only guide discussions. There are no majors or elective courses. Students do not seek answers from outside sources such as the internet and rely only on their readings, their own reasoning and class discussions with their peers.

That suits Ma Yeonwoo, who says he enjoys debating with his classmates.

“If only the teacher talks we can have one idea, but if we all debate together, like, we can get many ideas together,” he says.

This nascent educational movement addresses several concerning trends. One is that international tests such as PISA have shown a post-COVID drop in South Korean reading skills, after decades in which South Korean and other East Asian students outperformed their American counterparts.

Another is South Korea’s rapid adoption of AI in education. 51% of South Korean students say they use AI chatbots to study at least once a week, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) figures. Students also face intense competition to pass college entrance exams, which piles pressure on them down to the pre-K school level and prompts many South Korean families to send their children to cram schools to gain a competitive edge, or to foreign schools to escape the system.

Incheon National University Professor Lee Yonghwa (center) guides a Great Books summer camp seminar at Chuncheon High School. Lee, a St. John’s College graduate, established South Korea’s first Great Books program at his university in 2019.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

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Anthony Kuhn/NPR

“We all feel that this system leaves students with no time to read and think,” because they’re too busy memorizing facts to pass tests,” says Lee Yonghwa, a professor of English language and literature at Incheon National University, where he co-founded South Korea’s first “Great Books” program in 2019.