What is happening in Chuncheon?
NPR reporter Anthony Kuhn reports (NPR, 12 October 2026) that some South Korean schools have imported a "great books" educational model from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. In Chuncheon, a city about 50 miles east of Seoul, a public elementary school began using the model last year, and the city set up an academic partnership with the college. The aim, as NPR describes it, is to strengthen literacy and independent thinking, which educators fear are being eroded by AI and by a test-focused school system.
In the classroom NPR visited, pupils were discussing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the conversation moved on to whether AI can be considered human. One pupil, Ma Yeonwoo, said AI is smart but lacks creativity. Students also read authors such as Aristotle, Shakespeare and the Korean writer Han Kang, and a high school class discussed Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail".
Why are educators worried?
NPR notes that young students in countries such as Japan and South Korea usually outperform their American counterparts in reading, but that test scores have been falling in recent years and that educators fear AI could make things worse.
Lee Yonghwa, a St. John's graduate and a professor of English at Incheon National University who co-founded South Korea's first great books programme in 2019, describes a competitive system that leaves students no time to read and think, because they memorise facts all day for tests. In his view, growing reliance on AI is weakening even that skill, since students collect facts and ideas mainly from AI. And if they cannot reason independently, he adds, they cannot judge the quality of what AI gives them.
How does the model work?
As NPR describes it, teachers at St. John's do not lecture, and there are no majors or elective courses. Students work through the books together, in what Lee calls collective inquiry, using the texts and their own reasoning rather than outside sources such as the internet. In Chuncheon, the model is meant to supplement the test-centred system, not replace it.
What do the people involved say, and what is still unknown?
Chuncheon's mayor, Yook Dong-han, calls the initiative a small but revolutionary step and says students' enthusiasm has already exceeded his expectations. He hopes it will spread, first locally and then beyond the city. NPR's report gives opinions and impressions from an early stage, but no results data, so it is too soon to say whether the approach improves reading or reasoning.
What can a school head take from this?
These four ideas are our own general suggestions, not statements from the report:
- Ask for the reasoning, not only the answer. When any answer is a few seconds away, asking pupils to explain how they got there, aloud or in writing, tells you much more about what they understood.
- Make room for discussion. One short, structured class discussion a week around a single text does not need a new programme.
- Teach pupils to check. Have them verify an AI answer against two other sources and say which one they trust, and why.
- Add before you replace. Like Chuncheon, most schools must keep preparing pupils for official exams. Start with one class and see what changes.
Source
Source: NPR, "A Korean city borrows an educational model from the U.S. amid AI concerns", reported by Anthony Kuhn, 12 October 2026. This article is our own summary of that report. ClassMata has not independently verified it, and the statements belong to the people quoted in the original.