I’ve written surprisingly little about what’s keeping me here in Korea: teaching. Perhaps this because teaching is so repetitive and change in the classroom comes incrementally at best. That is, at least in Korea. Still, things continue to evolve. You learn something new each week about engaging students, about what to dwell on and what not to, about getting words and ideas to stick in their exhausted little brains. Some of my classes which used to be terrible, uncontrollable wrecks have magically turned manageable, the students actually responsive and approaching diligent. Some classes remain complete and utter wastes of time for both teacher and student.
The latter is probably applicable to most classes in the private, after-hours education industry in Korea. Textbooks are either over the heads of most students or full of useless exercises and dumbed-down reading. You have to teach the book, plowing through it in a set amount of time, whether it’s accomplishing anything useful or not. It’s all about metrics here: have you finished the book? Are the kids getting two writing tests and a speaking test every month? Metrics are essential in many endeavors but not if they are arbitrarily conceived and universally enforced, with no thought to whether or not they are promoting actual progress. Yet that is the nature of the entire Korean education system. Next Thursday, prospective students will take their college entrance exam. The entire country will go to work an hour late to keep the roads clear; if you’re running late for the test, a police car will speed you to the exam with lights and sirens blaring. College entrance is determined solely by your score on the test. Not your grades, not your after-school activities, not your actual intelligence or worth as a human being. Simply a score.
While I taught a TOEFL writing course tonight, I realized with a sudden and surprising power what I’d acknowledged many times before only with passing interest. The education system has failed these kids, utterly and completely, in crafting them into full and capable people. They flat-out do not know how to think. I had a few bullet points on the board but I asked them questions repeatedly about the reading and listening sections we’d just reviewed. I rephrased questions over and over, trying to examine details and points and overarching ideas from as many possible angles as possible. It might take me ten minutes of explaining an idea, asking them repeatedly if they comprehend, before I even get a hint of understanding out of any of them. Open-ended questions are utterly foreign to them. “How is the lecture casting doubt on the reading?” They don’t know. It’s not entirely a language issue. I speak slowly and loudly, enunciate like mad, and use the simplest and most direct terms possible to convey my message. Still nothing. Yet I have to accomplish something in this class, so I start writing examples on the board.
Now they go into a flurry, copying down with neat precision every word I write down. Copying. That’s what they know how to do: memorize, understand the formula, repeat it back again. Don’t understand the reasoning or logic or art behind it. Just copy and repeat. It shouldn’t surprise me, though. When you measure performance solely by tests, you should expect people to excel at learning how to test well and little else. The SAT in the U.S. is a example of this. You learn that process-of-elimination trumps any actual mastery of knowledge. Yet because the SAT is a single measurement (one under increasing scrutiny) out of many, we don’t entirely ignore the other aspects of a person’s development. But there’s no room for that in the scramble to the top here.
The presence of a parallel, symbiotic private education industry in Korea should therefore come as no surprise. When you teach people to think, you give them time to do so. Let them read, consider the questions you present them, and see if they find answers. Maybe they’ll come up with their own. Then you can critique the answers and find a new set of questions to answer. There is repetition but it requires self-initiative and facility with the nuance of reason and ideas. Yet teaching for a test doesn’t require breathing space for the mind. It requires harsh and endless repetition. Why do you think militaries around the world make their troops practice close-order drill for hours on end? Why do soldiers and Marines properly dis- and re-assemble a rifle, only to do it again, and again and again? Because repetition creates competence in that one single area. The same applies to tests. You don’t want someone who’s thinking. You want someone who can act adeptly and as quickly as possible. Unconscious competence, they call it. So the more training you get, to reach that end sooner, the better. Which means that you need lots of private academies, so that kids can get a leg up on the others. If you can learn to repeat the drill faster and more accurately than others, you’ve got a chance at acing the test. And with that, at least in Korea, comes the fast-track to status and security at the tip-top of society.
My kids thus have no background to learn to be deep, analytical thinkers. They are not encouraged to think in that way, nor do they have the mental energy to do so. Going to school six days a week, from 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM on most days, puts an unbelievable amount of stress on these kids. I can’t convey it well enough, so I’ll let them do it in their own words. Here are a few essays from my students. Recently, I’ve been trying to give them writing topics that allow some pathos to escape, to let them vent a little, because no one else will:
[Note: this is verbatim from the student's essay, all mistakes left in.]
I am very angry and frustrated in studying. If we want to have a good job that we can earn lots of money, we have to study very hard. Also I want to be an elementary school teacher but it is very hard. Because many womans want to be a teacher. So I have to study very hard. In the middle test or final exam, I have to study about 6:40 am. I can’t sleep well. I have big dark circles in my eyes. It gives me a lot of stress and angry. My parents are expecting to me. But I had low score. Everyday I said to them “I will do best next exam I’m sorry. I can get great score next exam. Trust me.” But I don’t know what I should do. My stress are very big. So I play computer or sing a song or read an internet novel and watching TV. They give me enjoying and smile. Only they can laugh at me. When I went home from the institute, I watched TV or computer games. Besides playing piano gives freedom to me. I can’t play the piano very well, but if I play the piano I can forget everything. It is my life.
This is a thirteen-year old girl. Her soul is being crushed. The push to succeed, to define success by scores, by college, by a ‘good’ job, by status, even at a young age, is stunting her. Yet she’s a drop in the ocean. If a kid wrote an essay like this in the States, they’d be placed on suicide watch. But this is the story of thousands and thousands of Korean kids, suffering silently at their desks, heads down, demeanors drawn. When someone says their workload is killing them, they might literally mean it:
[From another student, again verbatim]
I hate the test the most in the world. Maybe, every student in the world, hate the test (especially Korean students.) We are exposured to the test very young. It is not our mind. However, we must take a lot of test. Life is continuation of the test. We must take the test when we die.
I’m a middle student. So I have middle test, final test. I need to study to take these tests. It is very stress. Test kill many student. If student get bad score, student feel very tradegy [tragedy]. So they suicide. I’m very sad.
I think if there are not test, I will very happy. And study will more easy.
Students literally kill themselves because they fail tests. She’s not exaggerating at all. South Korea now has the highest suicide rate in the OECD. This is partially thanks to old people taking their lives due to their children neglecting them. But youth suicide is undoubtedly a serious problem and will continue to be so. At subway stations all over Seoul, sliding security doors are being installed at the platforms, to prevent people from throwing themselves in front of trains.
I feel pointless trying to expand upon this more. You read their words. These are not isolated students. They represent a lot of schoolkids out there. The bottom line is that this education system is not designed with a mind to a person’s worth as, well, a person. Their value is defined by the role that they can play in the system, how well they can contribute to the whole. It’s easy to argue that such devotion to bettering the whole has performed an economic miracle for Korea. But there’s only so much that you can achieve by sacrificing the well-being of your citizens. Korea is going to create a generation of stunted citizens who know how to imitate but not be dynamic and original. They may be mathematic and scientific whizzes, but without building the human capacity to innovate, Korea will find itself as the sweatshop of the high-technology and knowledge economy.
What is my complicity in this? I like being in Korea; I’m learning a lot about the country, the people, and myself. I have a job with steady pay and an apartment, a huge deal in an economy like this. But am I only furthering these kids’ misery? I hope and pray not. I do my best to build rapport with them, talk to them as human beings, to answer their questions, show interest in them as people. I expose them to new ideas, tell them funny stories, explain things about the U.S. in detail and in ways that will interest them. Yet at some point I must give them those writing tests, must make them do the pointless reading and answer the foolish TOEFL questions. I must perpetuate the system. Moral actions are always a quandary when the bad intertwines inextricably with the good.
And yet, and yet, out of these miserable students emerge some who exhibit a spark of intelligence, an irrepressible brilliance and luminosity of soul, a maturity that transcends their young bodies and minds. They speak with you intelligently, as an equal. One girl named Ally told me in nothing short of eloquent terms how she wants to be a diplomat because Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, inspires her. These kids are not products of their environment. The daily forces of their life have not touched them a whit.
In the West, there is a constant debate over nature versus nurture when it comes to raising children. Korea demonstrates the falsity of the idea that there is a choice between the two. Nurture is bullshit. These kids are nurtured from a young age to be miserable. Their education or upbringing, except perhaps in the youngest years just around their family, is not intended to craft them into empathetic, principled, thoughtful, interesting human beings. Yet some emerge as just that. Only some inexplicable, God-given gift could have turned them into what they are. They will go far in spite of, not because of, they way they grew up. They will endure immense, unfathomable challenges to their selves and come through it all intact, a trial which your average Westerner cannot truly comprehend.
Yet I suppose that’s because nowadays we expect things to be done for us. The solution will be better if something greater and more powerful than ourselves takes care of it. But the Korean education system, and how it dovetails with society as a whole, demonstrates to me that you can’t expect someone else to do the heavy lifting for you. Just because a service is universal and accessible doesn’t mean it’s beneficial. Just because it gives you something better than before doesn’t mean it’s all that great. You must watch out for yourself, even in the best of systems. Some people understand and can act on that; some cannot. That fact is one sadly not reflected in the Declaration of Independence. Not all men are created equal. They should be equal before the eyes of the law and God. But there are inequalities which you can never erase, not with universal education, not with notions of meritocracy, not with low cost of living and cheap healthcare. Systems inherently limit. The smart and capable inherently move beyond.
Every Friday when I leave class, I tell my students, “Have a good weekend. Don’t study too much.” They sometimes laugh, thinking I’m making a joke. I wish I could make it clear that it’s an order, not a request. These kids deserve a better, happier existence. While many of them won’t get it, there are those few that give you some hope and excitement, the ones you enjoy talking about with your friends over late-night sashimi and beer. Here’s to them, the handful of little ones who are going to be okay after all.
So decide now that you are worthy of living as a full-grown man who is making progress and make everything that seems best be a law you cannot go against.
And if you meet with any hardship or anything pleasant or reputable or disreputable, then remember that the contest is now and the Olympic Games are now and you cannot put things off any more and that your progress is made or destroyed by a single day and single action.
- Epictetus
1 Comment
November 7, 2009 at 2:34 am
You never know the impact you are having on these kids. I appreciate you care and concern for your students. I only wish they could return their appreciation to you.