Middle School Students’ Naked Graduation Antics (Continued)
I’ve just found two videos to accompany the story I translated in the last post. The first is a rather strange montage of (blurred) images of the students, complete with a surreal choice of soundtrack. It’s technically safe for work, but sometimes the blurring and the pixellation is a little sloppy, and so I’d avoid watching it at work myself. But do watch it, because it gives you a much better impression of how unusual the student’s behaviour was than the news report in the second video does.
I saw for myself that the news report did give the students’ side of things, but my wife says that overall the tone was pretty critical. Having seen the pictures in the first video now, I can’t say I’m surprised.
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I was shocked when I saw video clip from Freechal. I wonder what would happen in ten years.
What have we done …
[...] - It looks like The Chaser will be a Korean movie I will have to check out this year. - Video of naked graduation antics that has many Koreans alarmed. - Long time K-blogger Mark has a podcast posted on Michael [...]
It’s graduation day. People get crazy. As long as no one’s getting hurt, or forced to do anything against their will, what’s the big deal?
Korea’s Confucian social mores dissolving?
Like Marilyn Manson leads to Satanism and video games caused Columbine?
Kids in Korea are living within the greatest soul-crushing education system in the modern world, suicide is the #1 cause of death for kids, and we’re surprised/worried that kids let off some steam by spraying each other with foods of all kinds (actually, pretty standard procedure in Korean grduations), or a few took it a step crazier and got naked?
Big deal. Let ‘em blow off steam.
Next, the news is going to be shocked again that kids go off drinking after the college entrance exam (GASP!) or that high school kids are having sex (jumping Jehosophat!).
And yeah, the students say this is a little school tradition that’s been going on for years, and that pictures of it have even been on the Internet. The only difference here is some people nearby saw them and called the police, at which point the students tried to get the hell out of dodge before getting caught.
Even the local board of education knew about it, made the perfunctory motion of telling the kids not to do it, but essentially looked the other way.
Because it’s not a big deal, actually. I say, Christ - let these kids have a little leeway, since they survived the system. Maybe running around with their balls swinging through the wind is one way of reminding themselves that their souls are still alive and intact after a system Koreans themselves refer to as “examination hell.”
In my last post on it I did say that “my gut instinct is that it was is merely good, clean, harmless fun” and that “God knows Korean teenagers get precious little enough opportunities for that,” but I admit that my choice of words in this post could have given the impression that I was critical of it.
I knew that the flour and egg-throwing had been going on for years, like I said, my wife did that herself, but I didn’t realise that the clothes-stripping had too. In that case, I definitely overanalysed things in the last post when I linked it to the emergence of sexualised images of girl bands in the media. But it’s difficult to imagine any of the kids I teach doing the same, and if this is the first time people have heard of it then you can understand the reaction.