Actually, I know the guy who is directing the first English Village.  It’s a province/school district program.  So the province/school district sponsors it and the families don’t pay for their children to go.  They go for free.

I’ve been in Korea for just over four years, so I understand your concerns.  It is a hugely ambitious plan, but I think it could work.  It might not have the exact results that they expect, but I think, on some level, it will be a success.  However, I do think it’s a good idea to try to stem the outflow of money that Korean families spend educating their kids overseas.  Granted, that’s not going to change until Koreans change their education system (the English Village being one step in that direction) and their attitudes about the quality of educaiton here.

There will be weekend and short stay programs that families can pay for, if they’d like.

I too lived in Korea for five years and understand Korea’s “education fever” syndrome.  See the book by Seth called “Education Fever” if you have never lived in Korea.  It’s an eye-opening account of the phenomenon.

Also, I wrote some of the “edutainment” programs for the Paju village.  I also went there to help produce some of my educational shows for their opening.  Some previous posters here clearly are unaware of how their curriculum, edutainment, and staff is organized.  Firstly, the curriculum developers are fully aware that Ss won’t learn a lot of English in one week or a day if they visit for the one-day program.  But their primary goal was to make the students more comfortable using the English they already know when interacting with native speakers.  That is, their biggest concern was in the affective domain.  Secondly, those “jumping around in cowboy outfits” are professional entertainers from Russia or other eastern European countries who are practicing their art and career.  They are not professional English teachers.  The village in Paju also employs a good number of native speaking professional performers to play in the speaking roles in stage and street performances.  Finally, they have a staff of teachers whose job is to teach the classes offered at the village.  The curriculum can be redundant for teachers, but the curriculum development team endeavored, and continue to endeavor, to offer the teachers a variety of lesson plans to choose from so they are not locked into teaching the same lessons week after week.  The same goes for the performances.  They rotate the performances so that the performers learn to do new shows on at least a quarterly basis.  And that’s not bad for a professional performer.  Think of those who have spent the past couple of decades playing the same role in “Cats” or something!

And there are different organizations and government bodies in Korea opening English Villages, so evidence of an unhappy teacher at a Seoul English Village does not mean that other teachers at the county English Villages have the same sentiments, necessarily (or vice verse).

So do I think the English Villages are a good idea?  Too early to say.  We need to do some serious academic research to see how effective the villages are in reducing the Ss affective filter or in acquiring some English.  There is talk of building a small one here in Taiwan, so I hope that research will be sponsored by someone very soon.  One thing I can say is that nowhere else have I seen 1000 people of all ages shouting out the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives as they did while viewing our “Superlative Circus” at the village, nor have I seen kids so delighted to interact in an English classroom as they were at our magic show at the village, “Blackhat’s Boxes,” which had every showing sold out for the four or five months that it was running at EV Paju.