I Disagree

It's been about eight months since I left America and I figured this blog was way too heavy with melancholy homesick bullshit. So I figured I should write about the strange land that I am a stranger in.

I highly disagree with the way children are treated in this country. They are overworked, under fed and education isn't liberating it's programming. Fathers do not interact with their children, they merely pay the bills. Mothers play the both the maternal and paternal roles and utterly dominate their children with constant demands for higher grades, harder work and perfect scores. Children are often broken down, unimaginative and tired.

Anecdotal evidence on the topic:
I teach a really advanced class here with students that are essentially fluent. They're great kids and we've had an incredible and rewarding working relationship as long as I've taught the class. They are eager to learn my knowledge of history, politics, religion, literature and life in general and I never once had a discipline problem. I often find myself looking forward to the class.

However last week things took a change for the darker.

Summer vacation started this week, which only means more school just at different places. Attending school for fifty hours a week is not unusual here nor is Saturday school. And in that set of circumstances, these really bright kids increased their time at my school from 160 to 240 minutes. Four hours with three five minute breaks and I taught the last hour and a half.

It was heartbreaking and ego damaging to watch the kids that I enjoy teaching turn from well behaved, enthusiastic young adults to a gang of screeching children. Two kids broke down crying, one young lady just glared at me. My attempts at jokes were met with scorn and my lesson plan almost became null-and-void.

They had more classes after mine.

The students who have never left Korea are often hyper-nationalistic. These are the students who swear it is the best country on earth and view me as the "white devil." Many times have I had the "this is Korea, we should speak Korean" argument thrown at me. It doesn't even phase me now.

The kids who have left want to leave again and can't wait. They cite Korea as a prime example of how to drive people away.

Education is the religion here. If you don't have an education you are nothing. And I find this tragic. Maybe it's St. Wenceslaus Middle School speaking here but at least Catholicism is bad ass and cool. Gothic architecture, The Last Supper, martyrdom, general passionate stuff that you don't get in a ideology based on atomic weight and laws of motion. Even psychology is down played here. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy empirical evidence but I don't see why it deserves to be devoted to so strictly. It takes away all the color.

And what happens to these kids? They go to school for more than a full time job, they work themselves ragged in high school, get blasted in college and just when their social obligations of the objective are paid our old friend mandatory military service hits the scene rendering the average Korean male 26 before he has a chance to chill out before having a family and starting the cycle all over again.

And don't get me wrong, I'm all about strict obedience to a solid hierarchy. Not like this though. Not without even the faintest chance to reflect on it or reconsider it. I'm all about a healthy amount of pushing your kids but not to the point where childhood becomes a cut-throat competition. And this machine has kept the Korean people more or less a people for a long long time. This is not a machine that breaks down easily but if it does the results could count amount the greatest tragedies of the twenty-first century.