The Grand Narrative

Wow, a picture really does say a thousand words.

I’m in the middle of writing the next post, but in passing I thought I should mention this excellent video about the struggles of migrant and irregular workers in Korea that I just came across at Two Koreas. Not only does it present them much more succinctly than the thousands of words of virtual ink I’ve spilled on related subjects myself do, but it reminded me of how important Korean fluency is for being aware of and having a real understanding of Korean issues, for this less-glamourous side of Korea is rarely presented in the English-language media.

Not to imply I’m fluent myself of course. But the having the Korean text above and the English subtitles below means that, albeit with the liberal use of the pause button, I’ll be able to use the video for getting some Korean listening and/or reading practice with this afternoon. And before I forget, I found the excellent site Seoulidarity.Net through that post at Two Koreas too, with many posts of a similar nature. Even if you disagree with the politics of both sites, they’re both great for keeping informed, and certainly much more interesting than the average kimchi-making fare for practicing Korean with.

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Back in part one, I mentioned that there is still no single volume, definitive guide to Korean sociology, and so to get a good overall picture there seemed to be no alternative but to purchase a lot of books on more specialized aspects of Korean society such as marriage, developmentalism, education, gender studies, consumerism, ethnic nationalism, democratization, social welfare…and so forth instead, something like at least 15-20 books in the end. Of course, only complete Korea studies geeks like myself would ever contemplate doing so, but then ever since I started reducing the number of pictures of Korean women in bikinis on the blog, complete Korea studies geeks are increasingly the only people who still read it. Naturally, I would like to focus on things that keep both all of my remaining readers happy.

How to do that? First, to reward those who’ve read this far, let me point out that rather than pasting them up here, if you’re so inclined you can find pictures of Korean women to your heart’s content all by yourself here and here (both SFW, and a big note of appreciation to Lost Nomad for the latter). Second, my original intention was to gather all those 15 books or so I mention into a big pile on my desk and review all of them in this post, but it’s proved a much bigger task than I thought, and sorry, but I can’t do it before I go on vacation next week. If you can’t stand the nail-biting tension until mid-January, you can see the books I’m going to talk about (amongst others) in advance by clicking here, but if you do may I highly recommend downloading Razor while you’re browsing, definitely worth the wait.

Having said all that, just look at what I picked up in Kyobo:

Korean Society: Civil society, democracy and the state 2nd. ed. (2007) edited by Charles K. Armstrong

This isn’t a general guide to Korean sociology, it’s about the development of Korean civil society, much drier and more specialized, chapters examining pressing Korean sociological issues like this somewhat lacking. Actually you may have seen this book yourself years ago, which is why I’ve put up a picture of the firstedition to jog people’s memories, but were put off by the price: I think I first saw this in hardcover in Kyobo maybe in 2004, mine for…88,000 or even 120,000 won or so? Something outrageous like that. Naturally then, I was pretty pleased to find a revised paperback edition for a mere 44,230 won, but even that was still the cost of a night’s drinking, and given all the other books in my backpack already then buying it justifiably aroused the ire of my wife later. But actually before I saw it I’d already chosen to buy this book:

The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation: Dynamic Labour Politics in South Korea (2002) by Sun Hak Tae

And once I’d decided to buy that, just had to buy Korean Society as a…well…general overview of the subject to guide me through it. Sure, that may well sound akin to buying some nice, light reading like Lenin’s Imperialism as a brief guide to Marx’s Das Kapital, but let me explain.

After coming from the Royal Asiatic Society earlier, full of ancient and obscure books about Korea, I was very surprised to find still ancient and obscure but bigger, better and cheaper books at the otherwise modern Kyobo store. Two were published in the mid-1990s and provided a wealth of data about things like women’s workforce participation rates and other social indicators back then, and another literally gave a day by day account of absolutely everything that happened during the Asian Financial Crisis and the restructuring afterwards. All three would have been invaluable resources, at least for me, but I simply wouldn’t have been able to physically carry them back to Busan (hmmm, maybe I should see if I can order them before you all rush out and buy them). I was thinking pretty much the same about The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation, a very dry, weighty 585 page tome, and oh-so-attractively presented in the minimalist binding and typeface that minor university presses lavish on works based on their students’ theses, of which they maybe expect to sell five tops. But I flicked through it, and after reading in the introduction that the author intended to apply the theoretical model outlined in this next book below to the case of Korea, would have brought it home to Busan even if it meant leaving my wife and daughter behind, for it’s that good.

Capitalist Development and Democracy (1992), by Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephensand John D. Stephens

Primarily because of a charismatic ex-Sandanista/lecturer of mine, before I came to Korea I’d actually studied Latin America just as much if not more than East Asia, and was planning to go to Nicaragua eventually; lacking enough machismoto handle the pelvic thrusts in the Tango and any Che-Guevara’s hair however, Korea was probably the right move in the end. At university about a year earlier, I’d been studying Latin American politics for most of my time there, and of course knew a lot but all too often it had felt like learning history at school, in this case mere memorization of different countries’ political histories, and I often despaired of ever making connections between events and seeing trends, let alone being paid in the future to make predictions based on my knowledge. But then I read the book above, the bulk of which is about democratization, but which uses the experiences of all Latin America countries over the past 150 years as case studies to test their theoretical model. And once I read it, I had a wonderful moment where everything I’d learnt in the last 2-3 whole years of study of the region, which had often felt as effective as banging my head against a brick wall, suddenly all became clear in less than an hour.

To the geeks reading, I’m sure you know what I mean, because after somehow reaching one revelation while we’re students, where so suddenly we understand so many things about the world…we become geeks by continuing to study for the rest of our lives, in quiet desperation to reach another. I’ve only had three more experiences like that, my most recent about Korea naturally, and so it was to flesh out and bring some sense of closure to that that I’d already decided to buy The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation when I realised that it was based heavily on Capitalist Development and Democracy, my previous highly-cherished muse. After that, well, I would have paid 60,000 more than the 20,000 won I did pay for it.

Unfortunately, after stringing you along like that, I’m going to have to break your hearts, because I can’t do justice to it in the remaining space in this post, but I’ll do my best to give you a brief introduction. First, if you haven’t read my post Manufacturing, Childcare and Salarymen: Why Korea is such a fascinating place to study yet, please do so, because I’m very proud of it these subjects are intimately linked. Assuming that you have then, let me begin by quoting from Chapter 4 of Korean Society by Hagen Koo, entitled Engendering civil society: The role of the labor movement (pp. 73-94):

…this chapter takes issue with privileging the role of the middle classes in the making of South Korean democracy and civil society. Against this prevailing assumption, I argue that South Korean democracy and civil society did not occur as the “natural” outcome of economic growth and the expansion of the middle class, but as a consequence of persistent struggles by students, intellectuals, and workers against successive authoritarian regimes….Those who stress the conflictual aspect of South Korea’s transition to democracy…tend to give prominence to the role of students and dissident intellectuals. The aim of my chapter is, however, [to show] that spirited working-class struggles…played a critical role in bringing about both democratic transition and the expansion of civil society. This is not to argue that the working class alone played such a role. Rather, it was the close interaction between the grassroots labor movement and the student-led democracy movement that enhanced the power of social movements against the authoritarian state….And it is through involvement in labor struggles, directly or indirectly, that many students and intellectuals gained critical consciousness and later became leaders of the civil society movement. Those who are actively involved in the post-1987 citizens’ movements do not represent ordinary middle-class citizens, but those who had experienced the political and social movements of the pre-1987 period. (pp.73-74) (italics added)

Admittedly, in itself it is hardly a great revelation that members of the ”386 Generation“ of today were strongly influenced by events in their twenties, but its always good to remind ourselves of the volatility of life in Korea back in the mid to late-1980s. And regardless of what you may think of Roh Moo-hyun’s political ineptitude, for instance, he was a pretty fine human-rights lawyer back then, and you can often see traces of his then necessary confrontational style and populism in his political outbursts today. Seeing as how I’ve heard from psychologists that the vast majority of people’s personalities are set by the time they’re 30, and that certainly seems true of myself, then I would be very surprised if the democracization struggles hadn’t formed the prism through which the 386 Generation view events today.

And just to be clear, the “386 Generation” is a new term, and may just refer to politicians in the Roo Moo-hyun Administration, so Koo is arguing that the then young members of all groups involved in the democratization movement, many now presumably higher up in the hierarchies of their respective organisations, all retain this confrontational notion of politics today. Student groups now have different members of course, but for corporatist reasons many didn’t disband as soon as Roh Tae-woo declared the first free presidential elections in 1987, but instead morphed into the forerunners of the environmentalist, feminist and anti-American student groups of Korea today.

But having said all that, remember that that was 20 years ago, and so despite that strong influence Korean politics should not still be like that today. Of course, Korea is not quite the military regime it was in 1987, indeed riot police are no longer always the bad guys, but not only do frequent and sometimes violent strikes and demonstrations seem to be the norm (for an excellent blog on that, try TwoKoreas), but Korea has by no means fully democratized even in ”soft” areas like freedom of expression yet (see here too for a notorious recent libel case). Overall, it seems to have moved little beyond the ”procedural” democracy of mere elections and votes, and it is only on this procedural level that Korean politics appears like the mundane multiparty systems in readers’ home countries. This was starkly shown to me personally when I turned on the TV on election night back in 2002, and all I could see were rows and rows of old men in suits at the various party headquarters. In contrast, election nights on TV back in New Zealand brought throngs of young people and grannies, with the odd politician standing out only because he or she was the only wearing a suit (with the exception of the rabidly right-wing ACT party). But next Wednesday, I guarantee you that with the exception of Park Geun-hye, and maybe some secretaries pouring the coffee, it will be difficult for you to even find a woman in the background. Sure, much the same can be said about US politics, but rather than detracting from my point, actually that confirms it all the more: why is Korean politics so polarized now, when a relative equality of income distribution was so crucial to its miracle development?

Of course, like I said in my earlier post, throwing millions of salarymen onto the streets, wiping out their savings, and having no social welfare net to speak of would have any self-respecting former student-protester reaching for the Molotov cocktails, and indeed the number and violence of strikes, demonstrations, and protests have risen sharply since the Asian Financial Crisis. Korea going from having the highest numbers of salarymen in the OECD (and world) in 1997 to having the highest number of irregular, short-term, poorly legally-protected workers in the OECD by 2007 certainly didn’t help either. But the return to violence was not immediate, and it was not natural, because although the late-1980s and early-1990s were even more turbulent than before democracy was restored, by the mid-1990s “street” politics had died down to a level that observers today would find astonishing, and what’s more the lighters and barricades had been put away. Although there was a pre-crisis nation-wide series of strikes over new labor laws in the winter of 1996-1997 for instance, rather than a return to the bad old days, Hagen Koo says:

Whereas in previous periods, industrial workers occupied a marginal place in the civil society, through [these] [they] have emerged as a major champion for the rest of society. Another Korean labor analyst argues, “by exercising its national leadership over other popular forces in democratic struggles, the Korean working class for the first time went beyond the expression of narrow ‘corporate’ interests and began to function as a kind of ‘hegemonic’ class, whose class interests were perceived as representing the interests of the people in general.” (p. 85)

While it sounds prosaic in writing, my ‘revelation’ was beginning in beginning to see through the confusion of events and begin to get a grasp of post-crisis politics in Korea, not just blandly attributing everything and anything to the crisis anymore. In a nutshell, because the details is what I bought the books for, in the immediate post-crisis period, the government, management and labor formed a “Tripartite Council” (경제사회발전노사정위원회) to try to come to some arrangements to deal with the crisis…and here the sources begin disagreeing. Koo, for instance, thinks that it was significant that labor was considered an equal on par with the former, whereas most I’ve read say that it was very much a junior partner. And after it’s Tripartite Accord was signed on February 6 1998, Koo claims that most workers were very unhappy with the redundancy provisions their representatives had agreed to, whereas previously I’d heard that the reason for this resentment was more because the Government and Management reneged on some of the compensating concessions that they’d agreed to.

Regardless of which version is correct, the labor movement split up and has been involved in internecine fighting thereafter, producing a morass of acronyms like the FKTU, KCTU, KCLW, KFTU, CCEJ, CUPEJ, KWAU and the NFNDM (for starters) that I’ll have no choice but to learn if I want to be regarded as a serious commentator on Korean politics…but which easily disguise the forest for the trees, for recall that Koo said that before the crisis, the labor movement had come to be seen as a representative force for many Korean workers. Once they clearly couldn’t get their act together, then who did ordinary people have left to represent them? The old men in suits pressing the flesh on TV?

Not only have many Koreans increasingly been feeling effectively disenfranchised over the last decade then, but their increasingly insecure jobs and incomes have meant that there’s been less they can do about it. Moreover, while all this has been occurring, the Department of Social Welfare deliberately took a very conservative definition of poverty and unemployment in order to curtail the number of claims on the already very meagre social welfare funds available. Consequently, while Korea’s economic indicators have ostensibly recovered, the domestic economy is stagnant, the middle-class has shrunk, and precisely at the moment when Korea must make radical changes to its composition of industries, education system, and acceptance of working mothers and immigration…of course there is no unified ”Korea” anymore, and all too many Koreans feel they have already borne the brunt of what has effectively been a lost decade. Then no wonderpeople resort to violent protests, demonstrations, and netizen-led democracy: nothing else seems to work, and finally, the way stubborn, unreasonable way Koreans typically resolve conflicts makes a lot of sense to me.

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(Update: I just came across this semi-related thread at daveseslcafe that discusses this Australia e-journal’s discussion of this social science journal article entitled “Porn Up, Rape Down” that claims that access to pornography in America has reduced sexual violence there. I’m not for a moment denying that many other factors would be involved, and correlation of two trends does not mean causation, but people interested in this post will probably find it interesting. Because of my online MA giving me access to Leeds University library I should be able to access the original journal article myself if it’s there, and if it is I’ll try to figure out WordPress’s hosting system and will put it up here for people to download.  But I have to go to work now sorry, so check back tonight)

(Update2: Well don’t I feel like an idiot. I was already in the Leeds University Library website trying to figure out the journal name to look for before I realised that a) ”Porn Up, Rape Down” is merely a research paper, and a whole 6 page(!) one at that, and b) that you can download it directly from the third link I gave you. Enjoy)

Quite a while ago I discussed censorship laws in Korea in Part 2 (and a little in Part 1), and concluded that their strictness, pervasiveness, and arbitrary application were signs that Korea still has some way to go before it completely democratizes.  But they are liberalizing, slowly, and I also mentioned that the whole issue reminded me of nudity in the media in post-Franco Spain, which I learnt at University that Spanish women consciously and deliberately flaunted, in an emblematic way I guess, to speed the whole democratization process along (see here for an intro).

I think it’s some time before major Korean newspapers and magazines flaunt nudity with the Spanish bravado that Martin Varsavsky in that link says is the case in Spain now, although the virtually nude women often found on page 3 of the free daily 7am are certainly a start (see the bottom of here for more info (no pics sorry)) and help put paid to the by now absurd notion that Korea is a conservative country, but in the meantime I’m being perfectly serious when I say I think it’s vitally important for democracy in Korea that these trends continue, and not just because I’m frustrated trying to navigate more liberal Japanese porn sites, which I can’t read. If you don’t believe me, please do read Part 2: it’s argument is more serious than its accompanying pictures may suggest.

It’s been a while since I looked at this topic, and I’ve probably lost a lot of readers in the interim (part 1 and 2 used to be my most popular posts), so I’ve been meaning to check it out again. So while I was typing up my own post on something else which I originally planned to put up here tonight (which will go up tomorrow or the next day instead), I was happy to find this post at the Marmot’s hole with a link to a short video showing Korean movies’ best bed scences. For someone who’s been here 7 years, they show that things are definitely changing here, and were real eye-openers in more ways than one.

The video will definitely help me with my Christmas list this year, but that fact that I haven’t said the link is “NSFW” is revealing…technically it isn’t, it’s a freely available video and blurred and pixellated to hell…but given what the actors are doing, then I sure as hell won’t be playing it at work myself. And that’s precisely one of my points, which is that while it’s completely obvious what the actors are doing to the several Korean 13 year-olds who are probably watching the video while you read this, somehow the pixels render it morally acceptable and acceptable to show to the public. And like fan death, this is one piece of Korean bullshit (or Japanese for that matter) that I can’t stand.

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Boy, it sure feels good to have just emailed my exam to the UK, but before I put it out of my mind entirely let me give a big shoutout to my anonymous “classmate” who typed question 5 into a search engine and found this site…Was it good for you too? Regardless, I sure need a big sleep after all that exertion, and I bet you do too!

As for today’s post, the article I present below is rather critical of Koreans’ victim mentality, and while it may not portray Koreans negatively per se, it doesn’t speak well for their critical-thinking skills. Coming on top of my last post that argued that Koreans’ upbringing leaves them very unconfident and almost child-like in their first dealings with the opposite sex in their twenties, then newcomers to the blog can be forgiven for thinking I’m a bit of a Korea-basher. But before you comment to that effect, please spend a few more minutes perusing the rest of the blog. If you clearly haven’t, then your comments will probably be deleted.

Maybe. As I’m still a blog adolescent, then I’m naturally feeling a little cocky and kind of welcome the challenge of my first trolls, and I’m all for a Korean-studies style pissing contest after spending my entire waking hours during the last 96 hours researching and writing about Northeast Asia for my exam.

Seriously though, I’m surprised that despite my last post’s provocative title, it hasn’t attracted a single negative comment yet; maybe that simply reflects how the videos are such old news. So I warn you in advance, today’s article is also about a year-old, but even though it’s probably about a good 100,000 times less well-known than the videos on dating, it should be much better known, and is surely much more controversial. For me personally it was a revelation when I first read it, and I would have posted it on the blog much earlier but for only refinding my printout of it yesterday while turning my bedroom upside down looking for some notes for my exam, and not remembering the exact title until then I wasn’t able to find it on the internet.

Once I knew it, I was surprised to find that the article was only still available here (I told you TomCoyner’s site rocked!). Personally I don’t think much of blogs that merely cut and paste articles from internet newspapers, and so I don’t always cut and past things myself if a link is available…no, really…but as I genuinely think that this article deserves to be much more widely read, then I can’t leave it to exist on just one webpage. After all, some links of mine on this site are already dead, and there’s always the possibility that a meteor will hit TomCoyner’s server in the near future, so without any further ado let me do my bit to make the world (and especially Korea) a better place by posting the full article here also, and even more importantly shutting up and letting you read it:

War of Details

Andrei Lankov, Korea Times, August 31 2006. 

Every foreign resident of Korea is exposed to a number of habitual Korean statements, which reflect Korean ideas about themselves and their nation. Many of these beliefs are true, some are not so well founded, while others are strange — like, say, the well-known tendency of Koreans to boast that their country “has four distinct seasons” as if this is something unusual and unknown to most other countries of the globe.

One such oft-repeated statement is that Korea has always suffered invasions and wars. Koreans often say, “Our history has been tragic, for centuries we have been invaded by powerful enemies and suffered in their hands greatly.” Every visitor to Korea is bound to hear such a remark sooner or later, and most people tend to take it at face value. This statement might correctly describe Korean history of the last one hundred years, but it is hardly applicable to earlier eras.

Well, let’s have a look at the Choson Dynasty period, from 1392 to 1910. The last four decades of these five centuries were turbulent indeed, but what about earlier times? Even a cursory look demonstrates that it was hardly a “time of troubles.” Throughout 1392-1865, Korea fought three wars against foreign invaders, not including some minor border skirmishes with nomads in the north, and Japanese pirates on the coasts. In one case, the war with Japan from 1592-1598, known as “Hideyoshi’s invasion” in the West, and as the “Imjin War” in Korea, was disastrous and the entire country was devastated. As you know, the medieval armies, all those “knights in shining armor,” were not too nice when they encountered the civilian population. The two other conflicts, of 1627 and of 1636, were of much smaller scale — essentially, two blitzkriegs brilliantly executed by Manchu generals whose cavalry units broke through Korean defenses, approached Seoul, and forced the Korean government to agree to an unfavorable peace.

Let’s compare this with the fate of more or less every European country. Throughout the same period of 1392-1865, almost every country in Europe fought a much greater number of conflicts, and suffered much greater casualties. Let’s have a look at German history. The period under consideration is marked by at least four major military conflicts, each lasting for one or several decades, and resulting in mass death and destruction: the Reformation Wars, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the Prussian campaigns of the mid-18^th century and the Napoleonic wars. And these are only large-scale wars, each being as significant and bloody as Korea’s war with Japan in 1592-1598 (in all probability, all these conflicts were more destructive than the “Hideyoshi invasion”). Apart from these, there were a number of smaller conflicts, many of which were not small at all– like the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), or the chain of conflicts that accompanied German unification in the 1850s and 1860s. And, of course, there were countless quarrels between the mini-states which formed the Germany of the era, each such quarrel being a military conflict on its own right, far exceeding Korea’s occasional skirmishes with Japanese raiders.

Is Germany an exception? By no means. This is the fairly typical history of any European country, and against such a background Korean history appears rather quiet. Rather than being a country with a uniquely turbulent history, Korea actually was a country, which enjoyed stability undreamed of in most other parts of the world!

The same is true in regard to domestic policy. Of course, old Korea had its own share of court conspiracies, poisoned dignitaries, and scheming royal concubines. But throughout the same period of 470 years, only two Korean kings were actually overthrown (and in one case the life of the ex-sovereign was spared — an almost unthinkable leniency by the standard of medieval Europe or the Middle East!). There were two unsuccessful gentry revolts, each lasting for but a few weeks, one peasant uprising on moderate scale, some local disturbances, a bit of banditry — and that’s all! Once again, in comparison with France (at least a dozen major revolts, revolutions, and civil wars), Germany, or even relatively peaceful England demonstrates that Korea was indeed a very secure and stable place.

Suffice to say that the Korean army for most of the period had about ten thousand soldiers on active duty — a very small army for a country with population of some ten million. The armed forces were increased when the government faced a perceived security threat, but for most of this long period the Korean army was essentially a police force, sufficient to fight bandits, patrol borders, restore order in some villages, and ensure the personal security of the king. So much for the talk of the permanent invasions Korea allegedly faced: a country, which lives under threat, does not have such a small army.

But why did such a view develop? There might be few reasons, but I suspect that Korean intellectuals of the 1950s or 1960s were shocked by the turbulent nature of the last hundred years of Korea history (to be more precise, the period between 1865 and 1960). This came as a sharp contrast to the tranquility and predictability of earlier times. This shock made Koreans believe that their history has always been that difficult and hard. And, of course, Korean nationalists used these feelings for their own gains. But this is another story…

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(Warning: If you want something that even vaguely resembles this post’s title, scroll down to the chart) 

While studying Korean in my local Kyongsong/Pukyong Starbucks on Friday night, waiting for friends to finish dinner before we could meet up to go drinking (I’d already eaten), I was struck by the business of the place. Then I realised that PIFF started on Friday, and some movies were available at the new “Spark” cinema across the road (I guess). Despite living in Busan for 3 years I’ve never actually been, and with a baby daughter now I’m even less likely to in the future, but considering how much I went to and enjoyed film festivals as a dirt-poor student in Auckland 10 years ago then I find my present lack of enthusiasm for them now simply bizarre really. While pondering that I started feeling a little melancholy and just a tad old watching all the happy people 5-10 years younger than me sipping their lattes with their schedules and tickets in hand, which probably explains why I drank much more than normal with my friends a little later.

That meant I caught my wife and daughter’s flu, and with Typhoon Krosa outside to add to the melancholy on Sunday I had neither the inclination or physical strength to put this post up (and the next post which will go up tomorrow). Sorry. In the end I could did little more then try to reawaken my youthful film bug from its hibernation by catching up on downloaded movies…Clerks 2 didn’t help for feeling youthful, but was just perfect for someone with entirely too nostalgic memories of his student days in the mid-90s, and then, just like this review said, Sunshine was a potential classic, but with the abysmal last half-hour ruining it.

While I was watching that, the screen went very blurry on many occasions, which I can’t tell if it was deliberate or the result of bad focusing of the guy holding the camera at the cinema. After watching the Simpsons two weeks ago with someone’s head in the way for 30 minutes of it I’m getting a bit sick of the increasingly crappy quality of all the downloads I’ve been doing, and would be more than happy to pay for movies with decent quality. Can anybody recommend any sites? I could wait for DVDs to come out, but not only does Korea have harsh censorship laws but its censors are notorious for cutting non-trivial sections of movies out simply to make them shorter, often rendering the movies non-sensical in the process. Of course, TV is the worst: my wife used a Korean site to download Desperate Housewives, and realised that so much was cut out of them on TV that she decided to watch all of them again, starting with Season 1 (although I should point out that she’s quite happy to watch the same episode of Friends twice in one day, so it may not be that bad).

Still sick today, sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do: I hate to use them, but in a work culture that frowns on sick days one must resort to using some amphetamines healthy cold medicine from the local pharmacy to be able to actually stand up to teach. Considering their increasing illegality in Western countries,  Koreans’ attitudes to narcotics, and how little Koreans think at all about the contents of the medicines they take, a flaw not confined to Koreans of course but I’d argue definately the norm here, I’m always amazed at how when I’ll say to the pharmacist I have a cold and want some medicine, that they won’t bat an eyelid when I reject their first selection and demand ones with as much pseudoephedrine and/or ephedrine as possible, which they happily provide. Maybe they’re happy to do business with someone that knows his stuff for a change, or alternatively maybe they’re happy that I’m fulfilling their stereotypes of foreigners.

Anyway, that’s my life at the moment. As for those miserable peasants those of you who are merely interested in ESL teacher’s salaries in Korea, let me preempt your accusations of false advertising by pointing out that I never actually said “ESL,” I merely said “Teachers;” sorry, but if you want a newbie ESL teacher guide to Korea, you’re in the wrong place. Instead, today’s title comes from this graph from the Economist here because it neatly illustrates one of the points I made earlier about teaching being such a popular profession in Korea: 

Teachers’ Salaries

Sep 27th 2007

How much do rich countries value their schoolteachers? Wages are the largest single cost in education. If earnings from teaching are high compared with average incomes, then claims about the lofty value placed on education may have some substance. A new report from the OECD provides a useful gauge, by calculating primary teachers’ pay relative to GDP per head. On this basis, teachers attract a premium over average incomes of around 25% in the OECD. Teaching in Turkey and South Korea has a very high status, with earnings more than double the average income per head. In Germany and Japan teachers are high up the pay scale, but they are somewhat less valued in Italy, France and America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These statistics are not the result of teaching having a ”high status” in Korea; as I argued, teaching is such a popular profession in Korea because it is relatively meritocratic for women, and one of the few stable “jobs for life” remaining in Korea. But the Economist’s one-paragraph article can be forgiven for its soundbite, and actually I had no idea that wages for teaching were so relatively high here, although in hindsight 15 years of an uninterrupted career does lead to a lot of payrises for teacher that their counterparts on 2 year contracts in other professions lack, and so its still a consequence of the two features I mentioned. Having learned this though, when I get the chance I’m going to have to get detailed statistics for Korean professions as a whole, because if arguments I’ve made in earlier posts are also correct, then only civil servants and salarymen in chaebol get similarly high wages. Watch this space.

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Personal Stuff/Warm-Up 

Sorry for the delay in posting; it’s mostly been due to this horrendous ‘rainy’ season, the most humid but driest ever as far as I’m concerned, and it’s been playing havoc with my sleeping. Realising that this lack of sleep was the cause of almost all of the arguments my wife and I have been having recently, we bit the bullet today and paid someone 60,000 today to move our small air-conditioner from the bedroom, where we couldn’t use it because our baby daughter sleeps there, to the living room where we sleep and it can and will be used continuously until it explodes. I’m enjoying the fruits of that decision as I finish the rest of this post up (that cheery note was Tuesday;  it gave me 냉방 *%#^ing 병 the next day and its been difficult to do anything but teach and then come home and crash in bed since sorry).

But I have to admit that I actually started this essay post last Saturday, but it threw up so many interesting tangents raised more issues than I originally intended, so I’ve had to take a break to step back and think about it more, and even consult some books for the odd point that I haven’t thought about in many years. I also decided to give it a bit more coherence and make my arguments flow a little more logically than usual, which took time. To refresh your memory also, in my last post on this subject I said I was going to explain why the University Entrance Exam, or 수능시험, was so important in Korea, but not how, and in particular I didn’t want to get into the:

Whole convuluted history of the pre-colonial concepts of education, the establishment of schools by Christian missionaries, the huge expansion of development-driven schooling under Japanese colonialism, the continuation of and imposition on top of that of American liberal education ideals after both wars, and then the playing out of the convoluted mix of all that in the five decades since.

I still don’t, it’s quite a mouthful, and like I said there’s already an excellent book on the subject. But, strangely enough, different aspects of it don’t seem to conveniently split into “hows” and “whys,” and after some thought it turns out that I can’t ignore pre-colonial concepts of education because they still have such a huge impact on Korean society today. So, instead of naively assuming I could ignore it, instead that’ll be the focus of this post today. Or to be more precise, it will be:

The High Status of Educators and Education in Korea

1. The Chinese Background

My first introduction to Asian education, albeit obliquely, was through one of my freshman Chinese History lecturers Dr. Richard Philips, who was a such a sinophile that he would often wear Chinese-style shirts to class. I’m sure I’m doing his lectures a grave disservice, it was 1995 and I was 19 and I was interested in many other things in the lecture hall besides the Opium War after all, but I do remember his descriptions of the exams in China that had to be passed to become a province official or civil servant (for want of better terms). From what I recall, the exams consisted of little more than word for word recitations of Confucian classics. I say “little more,” but in reality the memorization required was an herculean feat, and Dr. Philips enjoyed mentioning relative “youths” of 45 or so who were famous for passing after only 10 or 20 years.

Three things of note from this already: first, it was an ostensibly meritocratic system, but obviously only men of leisure had the 20 years or so that were required; second, the pinnacle of education for at least a millenia in China was essentially useless, requiring the rote-memorization of increasingly outdated texts that were arguably never all that relevant to the practicalities of governance anyway; and third, this image of education in this part of the world, however simplisticly I’ve described it, is all I had to try and understand education in Korea upon my entrance to it in a rather shabby hagwon in Jinju in 2000. But I still mention it to any lonely newbie unfortunate enough to find me as the only other Westener in Starbucks that day, as from what I’ve personally seen of and read about the education system here in the 7 years since makes me think that that titbit is still relevant and useful to know.

2. Korean Elites’ Affinity with China 

Yes, China isn’t Korea, but Korea has been a vassal or tributary state of China for a great deal of its history, and given the present administration’s increasing anti-Americanism and cooperation with China then many Western commentators can’t help but say that it may be one day again. But socially and culturally, it ensured that Korean elites have long emulated their Chinese counterparts. Michael Breen, for instance, argues in Chapter 7 of this book that this was to demonstrate to the latter that Korea was China’s “little brother” rather than an”inferior and threatening barbarian state,” although with my Antipodean background, I would have described this as a cultural cringe instead. Given my own experience of the results of that in the Australia and New Zealand psyches, I am not suprised that Koreans attempted to ‘civilise’ themselves with the zeal with which they did; not for nothing is Korean known as more Confucian than China (which is not a feather in its cap as far as I’m concerned).

2a. Evidence: The Use of Korean/Hangul

To give you a sense of this, consider the actual usage of the Korean script hangul, which many Koreans will claim to you (within 5 minutes of meeting you) to be “the most scientific language in the world,” and who will be genuinely shocked at your complete ignorance of it before you came to Korea. Hangul is indeed wonderful, being invented in 1443 by 세종대왕/Sejong the Great (the name is deserved) to spread literacy to the public by providing an alphabet of 24 letters instead of the 1000s of characters in Chinese. With about an hour a day spent on it, it will take you about 1-2 weeks to learn; it’s sad that so few foreigners do that most Koreans will be surprised that you can use it at all, making them think that it’s harder than it is. It’s also strange, because being able to read and write it so soon makes it an excellent base language to go on to studying relatively similar Japanese or Chinese, whereas acheiving literacy in those languages takes years (my English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese-speaking Osaka-based friend, for instance, still has issues, despite speaking Japanese fluently for at least the last 7 years).

Unfortunately for Koreans, Sejong was a rare blip on the intellectual landscape, and despite Hangul’s obvious advantages to modern readers, elites were deadset against it, ensuring that Hangul wasn’t actually used by a majority of the population until the late-1800s. This was partially because literacy in Chinese was an important means of distinguishing themselves from commoners, an important point that I’ll return to in a moment, but the primary reason is because Korean state structures were explicitly modelled after the Chinese, the Korean equivalent scholar-official/civil servant class being known as 양반/Yangban during the 대조선국/Joseon Dynasty of 1392-1910 (and, according to the Wikipedia article on them, with equivalents in the 고려국/Goryeo Dynasty of 918-1392 too). I think it’s no great suprise then, that the majority of Korean words to do with politics (or science) are based on Chinese, although actually this makes them far much easier to memorize for non-native speakers.

2b. Sounds-like-a-tangent-but-isn’t-really: The Implications For Korean Nationalism

But the language issue has wider implications than just my Korean study methods, or demonstrating that Korean elites were complete Sinophiles. For Joseon Dynasty Korea was a rigidly stratified society, and the Yangban generally lived ”either in seperate parts of the capital or in seperate villages.” While of course the use of Korean would have been a big part of the working lives of lower ranked officials that mostly dealt with commoners (but described by Breen as 중인, or middle class, and not yangban at all), Yangban explicitly differentiated themselves by the use of Chinese as their lingua franca. Thus, increasing social status meant increased use of Chinese but increased distance from ordinary Koreans, with a corresponding identification more with Chinese elites. This reminds me of Dr. Philips’ (or perhaps it was Greg Bankoff, mentioned in an earlier post) descriptions of the world view of Chinese people (with the same system) as concentric circles of power eminating from the physical presence of the emperor, which is a good metaphor for the inherent heirarchy in Korean education that I’ll get back to soon. And, despite my repuation for tangents, I think that it’s difficult not to bring up how uncomfortably this reality sits with what you normally hear about Korean nationalism.

The first thing you will probably hear about Korean nationalism from Koreans (again, often within the first five minutes of meeting you) is that their country dates back to 2333 BC, the unspoken implication being that your own country is a joke in comparison. But regardless of inconvenient little details like, for instance, the fact that for over 700 years the Peninsula was split into four kingdoms that happily pitted “Koreans” against “Koreans” in various wars against each other, the physical locations of two of which that just happen to match those of regions that are still rivals in South Korea today, having elites speaking Chinese, identifying themselves with their Chinese counterparts, distancing themselves through language and other means from 95%+ of the surrounding population does not make them sound very “Korean.”

As a brilliant book (on the right below) I recently bought on the subject says, nationalism in the modern sense of the word didn’t really start in Korea until the late-1800s, strangely enough when the use of Hangul became widespread, the promotion of which (it turns out) was expressely for nationalistic reasons, and while there are strong arguments that there was a sense of “nation” in Korea previously (but existing for more like for 400 rather than for 4000 years), and there was certainly a uniquely long-lived state-structure, Korea was not a nation-state because these wannabe-Chinese did not want to be part of Korean “imagined communities,” which ultimately relied on commoners and non-Yangban intellectuals to construct themselves from the bottom up. 

2c. In Turn, Korean Nationalism’s Implications for Korean Education

Perhaps not automatically believing this “Korea is 4340 years old” line, and so picking up your travel books which, we all have to admit, we learnt most of what we know about Korea from,  you will quickly read that Koreans are nationalistic and patriotic…okay, that explains it, and the 2333BC thing merely sounds benign, and even cute when you hear that Korea’s founder supposedly married a bear who had become a woman by eating garlic and mugwort in a cave for 100 days, and kudos for reading some of the history section at the front of Lonely Planet: Korea. But at best banal statements that Koreans are nationalistic are not really very helpful: which countries don’t have nationalistic citizens? Monaco? Sudan? And at worst it is very misleading, for the familial, bloodlines-based nationalism that is prevelant in Korea is qualitatively different from that in America say, or even New Zealand (which I personally found to be nationalistic). This is a huge topic that many further posts in this blog will be devoted to, but as an apertif consider this, this, this, and this video to see how different Korean nationalism really is to what you’re used probably used to:

Korean nationalism isn’t the subject of this post, or wasn’t supposed to be anyway, but in any discussion of education in Korea you can not avoid the fact that the promotion of bloodline-based nationalism is a fundamental component of the Korean education system, and so it had to be mentioned sooner or later. It will be the subject of later posts: so why not now? If you still can’t appreciate the importance, then consider this, this, this, this and…hell, virtually anything the Metropolitician writes on the subject, who has been doing so for years and far more ably than I ever could (but maybe start with this). If you do, suddenly a great deal about Korea will suddenly make a lot of sense, and you will realise that the lack of critical thinking skills that the education system engenders is arguably Korea’s biggest problem today (which I’ll get onto below).

3. My Apologies for the Tangent: Some much needed light relief

By the way, I put that picture of the books up because they’ll be mentioned a great deal in following posts on this subject, not to prove how intellectual I am by dazzling you with all my academic tomes (I think my geekiness is well-established). True, interviews of professors on the news back in New Zealand always required some footage of them working at their desk (as if the camera wasn’t there) with full bookcases behind them to prove to viewers that said professors were indeed intellectual before we heard them speak, which was rather patronising to viewers come to think of it, although I confess it was amusing one day to help a professor friend frantically rearrange his office for TVNZ camera crew that had called to say they’d like to come and “chat” in 30 mins.

So, I could try to provide pictures like that if anyone likes, but once my daughter figured out how to stand she started pulling books out of shelves with a gusto. The first time, not only did my wife not stop her, she thought it was cute and took pictures and videos. Here is a much younger Alice getting stuck into what was once my fiction section:

(Yes, if I’d known 8 months later I’d be posting these cute pics on the internet I may have removed The Joy of Sex and The Complete Guide to Sexual Loving from the shelves beforehand…but then maybe not. What’s to be embarassed about?)

Thanks to that, now my books are haphazardly spread in piles in and on any spare shelf, TV top, Wardrobe top, or Kitchen Cupboards, basically anywhere that Alice can’t (yet) reach, so no can do. Sorry.

4. Back to the Show: Korea’s Philosopher-Kings Philosopher-Civil Servants

In some ways Aristotle was born in the wrong region of the world, for while his student Alexander the Great was certainly very pretty, he didn’t quite end up as the “Philospher King” that Aristotle had hoped for. I blame the accent myself, for while an Irish accent is annoyingly hip, non-poets should really choose something else to sound pretentious and intellectual with.

Or maybe Alexander was philosophical after all, but he didn’t fit in well in Greece because everyone laughed at his accent, and so he ended up attacking this Elephant in India years later because it was in the way of him getting to Korea. Yes, I know there’s easier ways to get to Korea than via India, but as far as I know the Greeks thought the Caspian Sea was an ocean, so give the guy a break. No, don’t stop me, I’m on  a roll here…

I think he undoubtedly wanted to get away from Greece and come to Korea for 4 reasons:

1. Military officials were also a big component of the Yangban class, I didn’t get a chance to mention it earlier, so Alexander would have fitted right in here.
2. No matter how liberal sexual mores were back then, it must have been very very frustrating to see Angelina Jolie everyday but be her son, so lacking ocean-traversing technology Korea was about as far away as you could get from that unfortunate situation.
3. As a sexually-frustrated pretty boy it made perfect sense to come to Korea.
4. Finally, because the predecessors to the Yangban intellectual-class (of his day) were held in very high esteem in Korean society. But come to think of it he would have needed to bone up on Confucious before taking the exams…Aha! That’s why he was going to Korea via India, instead of the northern route: he was planning to go to China first, as where better to learn about Confucious than his home country itself?

Okay, seriously now folks, I mention Alexander because while they were not kings, the meritocracy engendered by the Yangban’s integral and long-standing place in the Korean state seems much closer to Aristotle’s ideal of intellectuals in power than Colin Farell was, for, according to Breen again, they “saw their prime purpose as the devotion to learning and self-cultivation, and the only employment they aspired to was government service.” I see two direct effects of this for modern Korean education, the first positive, but with many strange side effects, and the second wholly negative:

4a. The Korean Public’s Perceptions of Students and Educators

When I was a student in New Zealand in the mid-1990s, the public at large seemed to have an image of students as lazy long-haired communist rebels, which many students indeed had of themselves too (I could never pull it off with my hair though). But the introduction of student fees a few years previously, rapidly rising to American levels but in a country that lacked a tradition of parents saving for children’s college tuition fees even before they were born, meant that most were too busy starving or racking up huge loans to protest about anything more than the fees themselves; hopefully the New Zealand public’s image of students is a little more realistic these days. In contrast, while Korean university students are justifiably far far lazier than their Western counterparts as I’ve already explained, students are regarded very differently in Korean society.

Being so recent academically, much of what I read and watched about Korea at University in the mid-1990s was about democratisation in 1986-87, and while I can’t give sources because they’re in a storage shed in New Zealand right now, please take my word for it that most of them said that students were at the forefront of the democratisation movement because of their long-lived high status in Korean society. Student’s strong role in Tiananmen in 1989 also comes to mind, and while I got heartily sick of studying democratisation at university I’d be interested to go back and see what role students had in it in Taiwan too.

Against this, there’s the obvious retort that what democratisation movements, or indeed modern protest movements, didn’t have students playing a large role? Like I said in NZ, for instance, the word student is synonmouous with protests. But no matter how generalising it is I can’t help but link Korean students to their yangban ancestors. For crucially, despite for all their flaws, and regardless of what they ever actually learned at Confucian school, for hundreds of years they were considered by Korean society as the moral protectors of the nation from the whims and caprices of avaricous monarchs. As Breen says, with the Neo-Confucian ethos of the new Joseon state, it was believed that “the perfect society began not with the system, but with the personal morality of the monarch….Looked at the other way round, instability was indication of a flawed leadership….A wise king’s strategy was to select learned bureacrats both for his own education and for the implementation of virtuous policy. The most important means for ensuring that the best talent rose into these positions was the establishment of selection by examination, as opposed to birthright.”

Thus, as far back as the fourteenth century scholars were placed on a moral pedestal above kings. Again, jumping from this to modern Koreans’ low “trust” of politicians but high regard of Neo-Yangban/professors doesn’t sound very profound or even Korean, but I think that it is: again, based my own experiences of the New Zealand public’s reactions to professors in the media, while they don’t not trust them many focus more on their (alleged) lack of dress sense and social skills than anything else, and of those that actually listen to them the consensus is usually that they’re too bloody ivory tower to have much relevance to real life. 

But the consequences in Korea of being put on a pedestal for over 600 years? I must admit, I’ve never actually worked in a Korean university, but I know people who do/have and of course I’ve read a lot about them (Korean Universities that is, although I do occasionally google my friends for fun). And the impression I get is of strictly hierarchal places where:

• Freshman students will protest if their major is being discontinued by their university, because that will mean there’ll be no younger students to lord over in coming years.
• Unlike the egalitarian relationships that exist in most Western universites, masters students here are like virtual slaves that have to clean their supervisor’s offices, make them coffee, and do a lot of the grading and other administrative work of the professor that is often the only actual “work” the professor does.
• That tenure is ridiculously easy (but not allowed for barbarian foreigners of course), having more relationship to age than any actual research done or publications written.
• And finally where there is so little regard for actual academic work that professors routinely add their names to their students’ own work, sometimes even completely plagarising them. And don’t get me started on the plagarism of works from overseas. Lest those last points sound too outrageous, I should provide sources, but there’s so many ex-professor government ministers resigning these days because reporters have dug up and investigated “their” supposed research publications that you can do it your damn self I don’t think I need to.

Not that anyone does anymore ever since Japan’s “Lost Decade,” bear all the above in mind (and read this) when you hear that you can throw a stone in Seoul and hit a PhD holder. Ironically, the examinations to become an actual civil servant are much more meritocratic than academia now, being one of the few jobs obtainable solely (albeit plus an failable interview though) through a good grade in the examinations for it, regardless of who you are or which univeristy you went to. This attracts a disproportionate number of women, and as it’s also one of the few jobs for life remaining in Korea after the IMF Crisis 1997 (I’ll discuss this more in my 2nd post on Korean drinking culture), at any one time up to 20% of Korean 20-somethings are studying for this exam: my 25 year-old sister in law has tried and failed the 90% interview threshold several times in the last 3 years, and my parents in law are (not unreasonably) beginning to suggest she give up and try something else.  

While the degree is unbelievable (no pun intended), all these flaws of Korean universities can and do occur in Western universities too, and there are many intelligent people in Korean academia, some of whose works currently sit on my shelves. Also, many ordinary Koreans are not stupid and are aware of the flaws in university education here: the movie in the poster below is actually very much about this (she’s called Moon So-Ri/문소리 by the way).

But despite all this, and I know I’m generalising because I’m tired and want this herculean post finished, Western universties generally being better funded means that they are more likely to fail and expel students who plagarise as much as many Korean professors, and perhaps only with plagarism on the scale that it is in Korea would a professor think he or she could get away with fabrication on the scale of Hwang Woo-suk/황우석. And simply nowhere will you find a country with so many people willing to lap up the pronouncements of professors as gospel truth, no matter how crazed, simply because they come from a professor (again, this is why critical thinking is sooo important).

I personally began to learn of this when I visited Insa-dong in Seoul and saw the only Starbucks in Korea which had a Hangul instead of English logo. The Wikipedia article on that in the link is simply wrong: this was not to preserve the “traditional feel” of the street as claimed, but was instead due to a local professor claiming that all the English on signs and things around Korea was harming Korean teenager’s Korean ability. No, instead of telling him to STFU, the local council banned English signs in the whole Gu area.

I could go on and on with more examples, but won’t: if that isn’t enough for you, consider how you’re in Korea, teaching without any teaching qualifications whatsoever…if it weren’t for the high status a degree confirms upon you here, would anyone let a marine biology, art-history, or even Korea Studies recent graduate anywhere near an English classroom? While the populist Korean media has a big role in the mania about foreigners with fake degrees, as I explained in a previous post, shock and a sense of betrayal after falsely placing someone on so high a pedestal has a large role in the reaction as well.

4b Concentric Circles Upon Circles Around Seoul

For all the flaws of the civil-service examinations in the Joseon Dynasty, they did allow some relative social mobility, very important in what was at its founding an almost caste-like rigid social structure but also in what became an increasingly trade-averse Hermit Kingdom over time. According to Breen again, in practice “there was some fluidity…as the ‘middle people’ class [중인] became permitted to sit the civil service exams, some peasants became rich and the numbers of impoverished Yangban without government office increased.” While over time many Yangban became very corrupt themselves, which frustrated commoners used touristy masks l(ike the one below) to satire in dances, the fact remains that a Seoul-centered, meritocratic examination system was in place, through which the successfull rote-learning of essentially useless information would open the doors to status, power, and even riches. Yes, you guessed it, I think pretty much the same can be said of Korea today.

Have you ever seen a Korean resume? Rhetorical question. Personally, the first ever resume I typed up after graduation and having duly read What Color is Your Parachute from the local library, was a very very sad affair. But then a 7-year older and wiser friend helped, writing in with this skill there, this attribute there, and before you know it my A4 page was filled up quite nicely thank you very much. But in Korea I would have been dead job-wise, for there’s no such thing as a personalised resume: instead, they are all standardized forms you buy at stationary stores, with spaces to fill in for your University and the degree you got, and then your work experience, if any. Although in the past 5 years letters of introduction have started to become important, the logical assumption (for graduates) at least is that if saying where you went to University is all that employers want to know, then that’s all that’s important, which is indeed the case.

In Korea, the 3 top Universities everyone wants to get into are Seoul National (SNU), Yonsei, and Korea Universities, all in Seoul and collectively known as “SKY,” and being a graduate of one is virtually mandatory for entrance into politics or business or high society in general, and if you are on you will have guaranteed jobs at virtually any company in Korea. According to Michael J.Seth, p.250, its also “frequently the most imporant criterion for evaluation…in marraige and informal interpersonal relations” too. This is why some of my 재수 students doing their exam again, are some of the most intelligent 19 year-olds I’ve ever met in my entire life, but are stuck in their institute 12+ hours a day 5 days (and a Saturday morning) a week studying for a year, because their scores weren’t good enough for SKY, and it is why most institutes teaching high school students here prominently display the names of the ex-students that did make it in their advertisements. 

Of course, many other countries have similar series of middle and high schools: what immediatately come to mind are all the Ivy League Universities in the US, Eton Private (strangely known as “public” in England) School and then Cambridge and Oxford in England, and the ecoles in France. But there are some crucial differences. First, despite the experiences of one commentator I think that the students of all of them would have gotten much much more sleep than their Korean counterparts between the ages of 13-18. Second, while I remember an interesting Lexington article in the Economist years ago that talked about a few Ivy League Universities liberally giving ‘A’s seemingly for the mere virtue of having worked hard to make it there, most were still academically rigourous and, with their fees and alumni associations, still the best Universities in the world.

But Korean Universities are so mediocre that a degree from overseas is increasingly more highly valued by employers. Even SNU, despite all its money, I think rarely if ever makes it into the top 100 Universites. This is because they don’t learn shit, 19 year-olds rightly feeling they deserve a fucking break after getting into SKY, and boy, do they take a break and do what the fuck they like with their first ever free time for 6 years. And it would surely be bizarre if Korean education suddenly went from rote-learning of facts to pass the test from 13-18 to creativity, exploration, and critical thinking at 19. No, I can’t find the post but I’m pretty sure it was the Metropolitican, with much more experience of all levels of Korean eduaction than I, who once said that the that teaching style at SNU is just the same as any other Korean University but in much nicer buildings.

This would be understandable if it was just for students at SKY; like I said similar problems can exist for similar reasons in the Ivy League. But this phenomenon is across the board, for getting a low score in the exam and accepting entrance into a lowly-ranked University is also a life choice, one to settle for an ordinary life, and while in most countries genuine study could definately be used to improve your life chances despite bad grades when you were 18/19, remember that its all about what you fill in that empty box on that resume form here. So to do so would be pointless (with the important exception, of course, of learning English, Japanese, and now Chinese; not for nothing was it not very normal for English speaking-Westeners to go to Korea to teach English before the IMF Crisis 10 years ago), but SKY students damn well need their break too, but the problem of academic quality is compounded outside of SKY by severe shortages of funds.

An effect of this, a complain complaint on Korean ESL message boards, is that freshmen students, who like students anywhere drink and have fun every night, have mandatory English classes at University, and so turn up to class asleep and hungover, don’t learn anything as a result, are failed by their foreign teacher (who could fart better English than they could speak, even if were paid to), but then the English Dean will bump up their grades to ensure they pass…for the University desperately needs their money. And Koreans wonder why they spend so much money on English education, a great deal of which is to bring English teachers like us from abroad, but are still amongst the worst English speakers in the world…

I still see concentric rints of power around Seoul in South Korea because all the best Confucian schools, and then the only Western Missionary-based schools and Universities, and then the Universities set up or expanded under Japanese Colonialism are all in Seoul, and Koreans have been moving there for the past 50 years primarily for this reason. What’s that you say? Seoul only has a population of 10 million or so, Korea 49, big deal. No, that figure, often quoted is simply wrong: the population of the Seoul Metropolitan Area is 22-24 million, almost half the population of Korea, and making in 3rd biggest city in the world but in only the 108th biggest country in the world. Now you know why you have to move to Seoul to make it in Korea, yes?

 5. Hurried Finish to a Conclusion

I can’t for the life of me find the page, but I remember that Michael J.Seth summed up the convoluted, inexorably difficult to reform Korean Education system as the way is because, on the one hand it has its elite Universites and certain high and middle schools that are required to get into to in turn get into SKY (which is why my 13,14, and 15 year-olds are always so frantically studying), for all the reasons above. But on the other hand, the social leveling of Korea as a result of the Korean War is a fundamental part of its society, economic development and ethos, and it has engendered what what would be called in New Zealand and Australia a tall-poppy syndrome. As Baltimoron mentioned, and a recent Economist article did too, it means that despite everything mentioned about status and the high value attached to education, gifted students are discouraged from excelling beyond their peers in this part of the world(!!!). For the education system as a whole, it means that parents damn well want good schools to be available for their children, the opportunity to attend them for the sake of their future life chances but also to distinguish themselves from their peers, but if they don’t, then those damn rich brat SKY students had better not get any extra funding or special treatment whatsoever. The two drives in the education system, one elitist and one populist, can simply not be reconciled, and this explains why so many Koreans know just how bad their eduaction system is, know what the problems are, but find them soooo difficult to reform.

6. Postscript

I am simply never ever ever doing a post that length again! As I become more experienced with the blog, hopefully I’ll figure out how to do all that in more postable-sizsed chunks. In the meantime, if you’re reading this on Friday the 27th, apologies because I strongly suspect I’m going to have to do some major editing that day.

P.S. Erk! After all that, and all those links to Wikipedia, I’ve only just found this section on the subject! I’d better check it out.

P.P.S. Oh my Gawd…is it really that long? I’ve only just seen it on the actual site for the first time…free beer for whoever reads all of it!

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(Photo by mookiechan)

In an earlier post, I said that seeing more skin and/or more in-your-face sexual behaviour in the Korean media could be a sign that Korea is genuinely becoming more democratic, and I gave a couple of examples of what is playing on Korean TV screens these days to get hits support my arguments. I admit, I may have gotten interested in this issue because I like T&A as much as the next guy, but I think my argument is actually quite serious.

Let me give you some historical context. This ad of Jeon Ji-hyun’s came out last year but I think is still playing now, and while I think the tea it’s advertising is technically marketed at women who want their bodies to look as good as hers, I have never ever had as burning a desire to drink tea as I did when I saw this ad for the first time. Don’t be scared of clicking the link to a Korean site, or any of the others on the blog for that matter; I searched long and hard to find a video of the ad that didn’t require you to install the dreaded ActiveX to watch it (which most Korean sites require), and actually you’ll be very grateful that I did, for its of much better quality than what is available on Youtube:

Now, my point: if that ad is not in-your-face sex in an overpriced bottle of tea-flavored water, then I don’t know what is. But that was 2006; this following ad was banned as recently as 2004…

…but I think that it may have been unbanned later; besides which, it spawned so many clone ads soon after that I think the Korean censors just sort of gave up. Before that, I think this was the most notorious ad that was banned. I don’t know when it came out sorry, but it looks old:

Admittedly, this historical progression maybe doesn’t seem very illuminating so far; practically every guide book about Korea says that is a very conservative country, but of course globalisation is changing that. Yawn. And the last ad should not be overanalysed, for even in America would it probably be banned on the grounds of good taste, no pun intended. But this is not America, and when it comes to producing risque material, be it of the erotic or political kind, South Korea law is so restrictive that I personally find it difficult to consider South Korea a democracy at all. This is why more skin in the media is so, well, important.

I’m really sorry to disappoint, but this post isn’t going to be a long manifesto about my vision of what democracy is. But I should quickly say that when I claim Korea isn’t democratic, the definition of democracy I have in mind is my own pithy “Democracy is the right to be offended”, a phrase I’ve honed in many drunken rants since I came to Korea. If my drunken rant doesn’t do if for you, then how about Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain in the  June 23rd Economist (my first academic link in this blog!), who says “The freedom to offend is a necessary freedom. Moreover, Islam has flourished wherever there has been a free atmosphere.” How’s that?

I still prefer mine. Regardless, it means, with many qualifications of course, that I am for the right: to burn the American flag for instance, even if it doesn’t really do it for me personally; to walk around with a t-shirt that says “Fuck you”; and for the right to hold peaceful demonstrations calling for the communist/fascist/theocratic/KKK/neo-nazi feminist takeover of the state, regardless o