RE: Korean Society Is In The Classroom: The School As A Factory
Korea’s education system doesn’t have room for independence. It has no concept of the individual. It only has numbers, from student number to the grade on a university exam.
I will be sincere, it's so hard for me to read such passages of this article without giving them a negative connotation. But since you're part of that education system, Dirge, can't you try to implement - I don't mean a Montessori - but at least certain values, like the importance of critical-independent thinking? Maybe this is not worth it from their cultural perspective. But then I think, is everything justifiable with the "cultural" argument? What is culture, an immutable simulacrum? Even my wife tells me that, when she was a child in Africa, she used to be beaten by the parents because that's the culture over there. This argument always leaves me perplexed. When I read your article all I think is alienation and a hive mentality.. probably I'm just an ignorant who's not capable of abstracting from his social system of values.
I do what I can but at the end of the day, I teach English to middle school students. I'm not fluent in Korean, nor is it truly my place to make change in their system. I hope I didn't come across as justifiying the system as "culture". It's not, and culture is no excuse. In Korea's case, the basis for the system is the military-enforced capitalism by decades of dictatorships. And there's lots of people who hate this and want to change it but the structure is quite entrenched.
As for parents beating their children, that's quite common here as well. Hell, teachers still smack kids with sticks.
How fucked up this world is.. what else can I say? It's sad to see kids trained to not use their brain from their early childhood. Brains filled and emptied and filled again with notions like vases in a race.. for what? To become more efficient slaves? Wherever
you turn your head in this world, you find abominable control and exploitation social orders. Thanks for this article, I'll print it and make it read to my wife, who's a primary teacher, specialised in inclusion. By the way, if you want to give an eye to the contest, Calluna wrote a very particular first part of the story.
She's probably far more trained than I am and would be far more capable of challenging things than I am.
On it