Children and Korea

By Bernard Rowan

Children are our future. Children tell us how we think of ourselves.

South Korea is an advanced society, but its democracy is quite new. Rooted in resistance to military and authoritarian rule, Koreans in the 1980s forged a democracy. It now holds the military accountable to the rule of law and civilian leaders to constitutional limits.

However, Korean society is so much older, and her traditions extend neo-Confucian and other cultural values. These values continue to exert inequalities of gender, age, and class on the democratic aims of the Korean Constitution. Mind you, every democracy on earth could say the same. The forces of monarchy, aristocracy, and oligarchy remain in present-day democracies. Power associated with wealth, race and ethnicity, gender, and other accidents reproduces them.

These forces hurt our children because they value accidents of circumstance and protect unearned privileges over the values of justice, freedom, and equality, principally equality of opportunity.

Today, Korean children occupy one of the more prosperous and promising advanced technological societies. But readers of Korean news and other stories also know that too many Korean children in rural areas do not receive the same quality education. Many Korean children bully each other. Too many suffer mental and physical hardships and illnesses associated with the competitive college examinations. Many commit suicide and other acts of self-hatred.

Korean boys go to school and college or university. Society accepts and approves them as successful men. Korean women still face a double standard, trading between their paths to educational success and expectations about motherhood. The double standard must end. It fosters and perpetuates privileges in subtle and blatant ways. It stifles the contributions of young women. It supports injustice.

The children of rural and poor families strive for places at good universities, often working against the odds. They lack the funds to attend the best preparatory schools and hagwons. They do not have money for tutors. This later creates great sunk costs, hidden costs, and social costs for the entire Korean society.

Korean education does not exist in a vacuum. The educational goals of Korean parents and grandparents support a bureaucracy. Democratically elected leaders and the people must renew and guide it forward. Education needs to develop a consensus to value the individual learner more. Korean education must invest in and encourage many more teenagers to attend university. Koreans must break with the obsession and manic fascination about extra schooling. Filling days and nights with tutors saps individual energy and can stifle creativity.

Do Korean parents think they can carry out education with hired hands? Involvement of parents in a baby's development, even by reading to them, does what no number of sitters and minders and teachers can do. Too many say leaving work on time costs us a lot. We don't spend time with our children to learn what they are learning or to help them with their projects. We prefer to spend money for others to do it for us and wring our hands about comparisons.

Subtly as we expect our children to "do it alone," we repeat the inequalities and injustices that conditioned our own efforts of education.

Displacement and projection are not the only behavior attending bullying and self-hatred. But they'd be my candidates for deconstructing "han" among Korea's people. When parents choose or jobs want them to work long hours, sacrifice scarce income, and habituate children to the lottery that is educational success, pressures exist. Parents under great pressure mean children under greater pressure. Children scapegoat the signs of social vulnerability (conditions of height, weight, appearance, family background, behavior, sexuality, and so many more). Those who commit and experience scapegoating suffer and harm themselves, sometimes morbidly.

Korean higher education should seek to have in every region an institution of higher learning that rivals Seoul National and the other top universities in Gyeonggi Province. Equally, more technical and engineering universities should develop across all regions. Korea needs to create more schools of higher education.

Korean elementary and secondary schools should de-emphasize cults of personality that may surround too many teachers. Old-fashioned gifting and homage to teachers smacks of corruption and guarantees nothing.

Rote learning and teaching all students the same way without differentiation for individual needs should go away. Korean education must develop cadres of experts in the arts and sciences as well as the languages of Korea's main regional and international partners.

I've another suggestion. Work to start an inter-Korean university. Make it a lab and experiment in peaceful education between North and South. Offer unification studies and all the arts and sciences. Shower the world with 21st learning and innovations expecting a fuller Korean future.

Children are our present. We've no choice but to invest now in their futures. They'll know soon how much we care.

Bernard Rowan is assistant provost for curriculum and assessment, professor of political science and faculty athletics representative at Chicago State University, where he has served for 21 years. Write him at browan10@yahoo.com.