"That's why we spend 12 years preparing for this one day. I know people who've taken this exam up to five times."
OK, so it's not really "one day" then.
I don't understand why.
"Instead of pitying us, I wish foreigners would think how awesome we are."
Passing exams is a pointless activity. I'm more interested in results. Those results can be measured in many ways - in power, in lives saved in surgery, in money, in kindness, in criminals caught, in lines of code, in numbers of citations in academic papers, in how many followers you have on Instagram. Korea is a fairly successful country, but it's not leaps and bounds above other countries that don't have this level of stress. It's not something I want my country to aspire to.
That "five times" means spending extra four years, one exam per year, without doing anything else but preparing for the exam to enter a college. So most people really hope to finish it in "one day".
It's because you don't live in a highly competitive society. People try everything they can to squeeze extra points out of these exams. It's the only way to get into good universities. Why do you have to go to good universities? When thousands of people applying for one job, the company will try to find the fastest way to filter out applicants, and your degree is the easiest way for you to stand out. In an ultra competitive society, you do everything you could to stand out, otherwise you won't stand a chance.
And the results are somewhat good with formerly Japan and now South Korea being one of the leaders in innovation. Albeit much less competitive China, USA, France and Germany are still close enough.
The problem with Japanese and Korean style of achievement is that it can get you to rest on your laurels and additionally it is anti-creative, strongly promoting patterns, knowledge and effort over novel approaches.
All in all, few types, perhaps even none, of standardized tests allow novel solutions.
> And the results are somewhat good with formerly Japan and now South Korea being one of the leaders in innovation. Albeit much less competitive China, USA, France and Germany are still close enough.
If you consider suicide being the leading cause of death between 11 and 30 among S. Koreans, the results are good.
That sucks. And it makes me feel like maybe SATs aren't so bad. I feel like scoring well on the SAT doesn't actually require preparation, just high literacy and a willingness to think the questions through.
Getting a high/near-perfect score on the SAT does require preparation due to time pressure. SAT candidates need to be able to arrive at the correct answer almost instinctively (mostly via pattern-matching and some reasoning). This entails practice.
The material tested in the US SATs is relatively unsophisticated compared to the curricula of many East Asian countries. My understanding is that SATs test for quickness of reasoning more than anything else. (SAT subject tests go into more depth, but are still have nowhere near the coverage of East Asian exams)
> Getting a high/near-perfect score on the SAT does require preparation due to time pressure.
Sure, but it is completely possible to get a very high score with virtually no practice. Time constraints are an issue, but not too huge of one, so long as you are willing to trust your gut so to speak.
> The material tested in the US SATs is relatively unsophisticated compared to the curricula of many East Asian countries.
> Sure, but it is completely possible to get a very high score with virtually no practice
Only if you are naturally highly intelligent. Folks of above average intelligence (but not in the upper percentiles) tend to need to work at it (many do and succeed).
> That is exactly why I think the SAT is superior.
Only if you are interested in "g" intelligence alone as a pure metric, in which case psychometric instruments like the Advanced Raven Progressive Matrices should also be admissible.
The SATs give you one metric of preparedness for college, arguably an important one. But the East Asian exams give you another: grit. It's much harder for a smart person to succeed at them without any effort. That said, I'm not condoning them since I believe the East Asian focus on exams often does go overboard and devolves into mismeasurement (i.e. how good you are at taking tests).
But intelligence, measured in isolation, is not a good metric for college-readiness especially in technical fields, where you need a certain measure of grit to do well in the material. I've known stars in high school who struggled when they had to apply themselves.... when you're used to things coming easily to you all your life, it can be demoralizing to have to work at things.
Not sure about that. The high school stars in my example were the effortlessly smart sort (high IQ, crammed before exams).
But to your other point about working hard only when it's needed, there is a class of skills (so called "bicycle skills" [1]) that have to be learned in advance, and cannot be picked up on the fly. Mastering those skills early in life can lead to compound interest payoffs later on. So I don't agree with YAGNI as a general rule.
Furthermore, even if the material you learn isn't going to be useful, it doesn't mean that the process of learning them is necessarily wasted. On the contrary, the process of acquiring mastery itself can pay dividends in the form of meta-skills. Take learning to play the piano for instance. The blogger "Ask a Korean" has this to say: [2]
"The point of learning the piano is NOT about acquiring the skill of playing the piano so that the student can earn a living as a pianist. It is about building the character of the person. Here is the thing about character -- you can't build it by explicitly setting out to build it. Character is not a skill like tying your shoelaces. If it must be put in terms of "skill", character is a "meta-skill" -- a foundational human skill that is necessary to perfect any number of mechanical skills. And the only way to develop this meta-skill is to develop at least one highly sophisticated mechanical skill, such that the student may acquire the meta-skill in the course of building the mechanical skill."
Yup, SAT can be taken preparation-less, because it is relatively devoid of subject matter content. It is approximately an IQ test. Since Korean SAT is intended to test subject matter content understanding, it doesn't work that way.
Interestingly, Korean public service exam is very similar to SAT in that it can be taken preparation-less (in fact, preparation-less-ness is an explicit design goal of the test) and similarly devoid of subject matter content.
Source: I took both Korean SAT and Korean public service exam.
Things like these should make any nation ashamed of itself. This kind of pressure on a growing child can only destroy him or her, and it's no wonder why kids are killing themselves. It's like planting a ticking bomb in their heads and hoping it wouldn't explode if something goes wrong.
As a highly educated person myself, I can't deny that studying, learning and improving yourselves are fundamental parts of the process of growing up and becoming a useful member of society, but it can't be done at the expense of someone's sanity, because it totally nullifies its value. Stuffing a kid of knowledge like a pâté goose stops him or her from really enjoying probably it's most critical years to the fullest, and I just can't really see this as a positive thing.
Well said. I'd also like to add that the opportunity costs of losing bright minds to suicide, burnout, backstabbing, etc. at a higher rate detracts from the argument that this might produce a more productive society. So from a central planner's perspective, this seems like a bad idea too.
How do you think S. Korea transformed from THE poorest nation on the planet after 1953 end of Korean War to top 10 - 15 nation in a 65 year period? Imagine, there are still people alive who were born in the poorest nation on the planet, and now living in a nation that is ranked 15th in GDP. South Korean passport is ranked 3rd most accepted, tied with Germany and France.
It wasn't because of natural resources or oil.
It wasn't any modern industry that just had to recover after the war such as Germany or Japan did. South Korea had NO modern industry of any kind, higher education institution, a modern workforce, effective government agencies, etc. S. Korea was literally a hell hole of a nation in 1953.
After the WTF period Koreans went through from 1910 to 1953 (after having had a 500 years long kingdom, the Chosun dynasty), South Korea just had to do what was necessary to survive.
And only way they saw how was producing a workforce to be productive. And no, Montessori method was not a viable option.
You don't have to be a highly educated non-Korean to see the education system is not quite right or wrong. Many highly educated and even not so highly educated people IN S. Korea know the question is valid to ask. Some want a change. Many who immigrated out of S. Korea to US and other nations list 2 reasons for leaving the nation, 1) conscription army and 2) the college entrance exam, the Suneung. But it was a system created at a time when there was no time to debate, but to act quickly to produce a workforce, just to survive as a nation. And it has delivered so far.
Yes the suicides are tragic. But consider this. Far more S. Koreans have died (including newborn, young, old) from lack of basic medical care in South Korea when only select few had access to modern medical care up until 1970's, 80's. The nation and citizens couldn't pay for it, for lack of wealth, from due to lack of skills needed by a modern workforce. But now that they can afford it, a nation wide medical care system is in place. Without educating the workforce (and yes the Suneung), they wouldn't have that luxury.
Easy for you to say they should be ashamed of that. I quite disagree.
Before Suneung, there were equally, if not more, grueling college entrance exams. I think the point the commentor is trying to make is that this type of education has been the fuel for Korea's social and economic rise.
And note, historically, that under earlier Korean dynasties from 958 CE Korean elites like their counterparts in China vied for official posts through a grueling set of state exams, collectively known as the "gwageo". The median age of passing the final phase was around 35 years in age, and with a very low rate of passing (14600 passers between 1393-1894, among many millions of aspirants over the centuries) this effectively meant that most members of the elite class spent long decades mastering the complex Confucian canon and wide range of poetic forms required for success. Some passers were in their 70s.
South Korea transformed from the poorest nation to the richest not because of the trope that education was largely responsible and I don't discount that but it's far fetched to suggest that as a single cause.
After all, without Park Chung Hee's military dictatorship, without essentially enslaving 1/2 of the population as a glorified slave with the threat of violence, without handing over the destiny of millions of Koreans to the hands of the dozen family run corporate dynasties (aka chaebols), without the massacre and denial of reparations and the censure, capture, torture and killing of dissidents,
South Korea would not be as successful as it is.
Life in South Korea during the military dictatorship which lasted 2.5 generations, was just as hard if not oppressive like the North. If you read about the Gwangju Massacre (Korea's Tianmen Square), it's pretty clear that South Korea was virtually no different than North Korea in terms of political freedom.
This is the miracle of the Asian tigers - when you don't have natural commodity, the people become that commodity, expendable, something to be taken advantage of by people with capital.
May I polititely suggest that your assertion of equivalence between South Korea and North Korea in terms of political freedom during the Park and Chun years is overwrought nonsense. Just ask any South Korean who lived through this period or any American peace corps volunteer like me who lived in the countryside (near Gwangju in fact) in the 1970s under the Park regime and who studied in graduate school in Seoul under the Chun regime in the 1980s. The issues are complex and require long, nuanced elaboration, but in crude terms Park was all but a fascist in name during his dictatorship and Chun was largely a loutish thug. Park is remembered surprisingly fondly by his generation, while Chun is reviled. And it is true that political dissidents were brutally treated by both Park and Chun and that the 1980 Gwangju Massacre was a horrible incident for which Chun later went to prison. However, North Korea was much worse in its control, e.g. over all religious groups and intellectuals. If you had a bad class background ("seongbun") you had nil chance for any higher education or social advancement. And with the growing cult of personality of Kim Il Sung from the mid-1960s, virtually no one could hope to express openly any thoughts critical of Kim or the Worker's Party official party line. In sum, life in the south under Park was by turns comic and tiring (the whole nation was forced to arise at 6 am every day!) and under Chun disspiriting and at the margin dangerous, but in the north under Kim, little or no freedom of personal expression existed even between spouses. Just check out the personal accounts of those who lived through it.
I don't think it's fair to take anecdotes from American peace corp which was known to be by large, a front to promote American interests in foreign countries. PCH and CDH wouldn't be where they are if the American government didn't recognize them as a legitimate force. PCH's head of intelligence, ultimately tried unsuccessfully to pull off a coup, panicked when Americans ignored him and spun it as a patriotic martyr who "shot the dictator", to save face. Why else would KJG try to contact American embassy repeatedly? It wasn't to run, after all he wouldn't have ordered his bodyguards to kill those who weren't in the know. It has all the sign of a coup.
I am not saying life in the late 60s and throughout 70s was equally oppressive on the full spectrum of society but it was nevertheless rigid, militant and thugs were used to suppress worker's union and human rights activists. You don't hear about the thousands of families who had suffered under Park and Chun, instead you only hear about the nominal GDP. If North Korea had the Kim family, South Korea had Republic of Korea, the country itself became an idolized almost humanized symbol of the state it was in-war torn, politically unstable, national security under constant threat and skirmishes from a nearby enemy. When you force people to stop and sing the national anthem everyday and arrest people for failing to comply, when you attempt to torture and assassinate political rivals (former president KDJ), when you enforce martial law and national curfew, when you dictate the consciousness of millions through a government run media, how is that not any different from the massive cult that North has built up? A cult built up on jingoism, the ends justify the means sort of approach, sure one could argue the sacrifice of that generation was necessary but for who's benefit? Ultimately, the profits and power only grew and consolidated under the handful of men and women who simply happened to be in a position to work with the government's generous credit loans to build the empire they dreamed of. Koreans today are not happy, students are killing themselves more than any other region, people don't want to raise kids, instead grow old like Japan.
My father was a journalist for a then military dictatorship run media outlet. He saw firsthand and told me stories of how the system worked and how it permeated through out the entire social hierarchy with impunity, no checks or balances, just pure straight up brainwashing.
The miracle of the Han river is red with the tears, sweat and blood of our forefathers who imagined a different type of Korea, one that isn't a glorified feudalism with smartphones that spy on the citizens, a military aiming their guns at the citizens, while the Samsung and the Hyundais happily go through generation after generation of brainwashed citizens who are reaching for that elusive "Korean Dream" through a institutionalized natural selection process that preaches neo-confucian values when in reality, it's a thin veil for the otherwise corrupt social hierarchy that dictates a person's age and seniority plays more importance then merit, competence and transparency.
The woke Koreans are the ones who are desperately trying to leave a country covered in fine dust pollution, where kids no longer play outside without a industrial mask, while the chaebol's offsprings are partying it up in prestigious American institutions in pristine clean neighborhoods.
This is the glorious post-ww2 Japanese model in which PCH has adhered to, with hopes of becoming an economic and a military power that is supposed to provide a roof over the citizens head that weathers through storms, instead it has largely become a state which coerced its citizens into working in squalor conditions to meet the material demands of the West with cheap labor.
"A perfect slave is the one who thinks he is free" couldn't be more true in South Korea.
people become that commodity, expendable, something to be taken advantage of by people with capital.
Around where I am, I see plenty of western corporations doing above, even with plenty of natural commodity to extract from.
And no, you simply cannot compare Park Chung Hee with Kim of North Korea to be equally dictatorial/brutal/etc. You simply lose all credibility when you make that assertion, while discussing Korean affairs.
Education was the single most important factor for S. Korea. And successful introduction of market based economy too, how ever troublesome it was. But without educated, competent workforce, nothing will work.
Also, you stated that S. Korea's wealth improved due to enslaving half of the population, and chaebols being given control over affairs in S. Korea.
What about N. Korea? N. Korea enslaved the entire population, with complete control that the chaebols of S. Korea can only dream about. And look where N. Korea is now. Practically a beggar state.
Kind of related, but I've been curious about this -- highly educated countries also have very high voter turnout. I think South Korea has about 77% voter turnout. I think the U.S. has about 50-55% voter turnout. The more educated everyone is, the more they want to participate. I disagree that this should make you feel ashamed. I think it has its pros and cons.
Agree, the purpose of education is to build people up. It should be academically broad, and consisting of other character building activities so that when someone leaves an institution they are a much "better" or at least more developed person than when they came. Not destroy their psyche while at the same time imparting a few useful skills.
You need to understand this is ingrained into their culture. There's no reason for them to step back and think "we should be ashamed" because it's part of your life. It sucks but change will no be easy.
Below is problem 33 of this year's English exam. For the English section of the exam, there are a total of 45 questions; 17 listening comprehension (around 25 minutes) and 28 reading comprehension questions (around 45 minutes). Imagine yourself (if you're non-Korean) trying to comprehend something like this in a completely foreign language.
33.
Heritage is concerned with the ways in which very selective material artefacts,
mythologies, memories and traditions become resources for the present. The
contents, interpretations and representations of the resource are selected
according to the demands of the present; an imagined past provides resources
for a heritage that is to be passed onto an imagined future. It follows too
that the meanings and functions of memory and tradition are defined in the
present. Further, heritage is more concerned with meanings than material
artefacts. It is the former that give value, either cultural or financial, to
the latter and explain why they have been selected from the near infinity of
the past. In turn, they may later be discarded as the demands of present
societies change, or even, as is presently occurring in the former Eastern
Europe, when pasts have to be reinvented to reflect new presents. Thus heritage
is __________________. [3 points]
① about preserving universal cultural values
② a mirror reflecting the artefacts of the past
③ neither concerned with the present nor the future
④ as much about forgetting as remembering the past
⑤ a collection of memories and traditions of a society
It's questions like this that make me glad I don't take standardized tests anymore.
When I took the GREs in 2008, I received a 480 on the verbal section (which was bad given I was applying to PhD programs), and a perfect 6/6 on the written section. I actually didn't qualify for a handful of programs, because they required ESL students to achieve 500 or greater (so I was below what a non-english speaker needs to score, and I spoke english as a first language). So, somehow I was an excellent writer, but had poor verbal skills.
It's remarkable that we test people against this style of language, both domestically in the US and abroad, given the unlikeliness someone will ever stumble across this type of prose. And, if you do, you should really ask the writer why they're trying to be so convoluted in their argument.
While this is a good taste of Suneung, note that this problem is considered the most difficult one in this year's English exam. (The day after Suneung, major newspapers report the difficulty assessment of the test done by professional analysts. I read about this problem there.)
My guess as a non-native speaker (living in an english-speaking country) is 4, and the next best is 3. That's how I interpret the description above the answers. But the tricky part is that that the sentences are incredibly convoluted, and that the word might already have a slightly different definition for most people (like 5).
I guessed 4 as well. My take away from the passage was that despite what people think, what is often represented as heritage can be selective in nature. The clue was in the phrase "why they have been selected from the near infinity of the past".
This is only the tip of the iceberg. It appears that in order to force everybody on a normal distribution map, they've gone well past the original purpose of the government exams, which was originally a neo-Confucian artifact to promote egalitarianism-the idea that even peasants who pass the government exams are able to improve their social standing after a long period of caste society based on lineage.
This means students aren't tested even on rote memorization or any of the necessary skills in the real world. Instead, they've become victim to the billion dollar industry of extra-cirricular cram schools. Public schools have become completely dependent on a widely unregulated cram schools because it's become impossible to come out on top when everybody is getting specialized help. You can't fault these parents either, these exams are insane and it makes sense that there is demand for extra tutoring.
The biggest tragedy of this is that it's no longer egalitarian like in it's tradition, it's about who has the money and can pay for their child's education. Low middle class Korean families can't support the cost of raising a child in this hyper education focused culture with very little prouductivity other than elevating the truly gifted exam takers running the country with no experience other than from books.
A big reason why in South Korea, you can commit horrible crimes and almost get a slap on the wrist because of incompetent, unexperienced judges and prosecutors who have mastered the art of climbing the Korean ladder, a giant bureaucracy that permeates through every part of Korean culture. Neo-confucianism is facing significant stress and young Koreans are undergoing social change.
I'm not exactly used to answering these questions, but 5 seems the obvious choice here - the others being clearly unrelated. Is this really an example of the difficulty of this exam?
If my answer is wrong that would indeed be ironic... I'd love to be corrected.
40 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadOK, so it's not really "one day" then.
I don't understand why.
"Instead of pitying us, I wish foreigners would think how awesome we are."
Passing exams is a pointless activity. I'm more interested in results. Those results can be measured in many ways - in power, in lives saved in surgery, in money, in kindness, in criminals caught, in lines of code, in numbers of citations in academic papers, in how many followers you have on Instagram. Korea is a fairly successful country, but it's not leaps and bounds above other countries that don't have this level of stress. It's not something I want my country to aspire to.
It's because you don't live in a highly competitive society. People try everything they can to squeeze extra points out of these exams. It's the only way to get into good universities. Why do you have to go to good universities? When thousands of people applying for one job, the company will try to find the fastest way to filter out applicants, and your degree is the easiest way for you to stand out. In an ultra competitive society, you do everything you could to stand out, otherwise you won't stand a chance.
The problem with Japanese and Korean style of achievement is that it can get you to rest on your laurels and additionally it is anti-creative, strongly promoting patterns, knowledge and effort over novel approaches.
All in all, few types, perhaps even none, of standardized tests allow novel solutions.
If you consider suicide being the leading cause of death between 11 and 30 among S. Koreans, the results are good.
I'm not sure about this. From what I've read, Chinese society is more competitive, not less.
The material tested in the US SATs is relatively unsophisticated compared to the curricula of many East Asian countries. My understanding is that SATs test for quickness of reasoning more than anything else. (SAT subject tests go into more depth, but are still have nowhere near the coverage of East Asian exams)
Sure, but it is completely possible to get a very high score with virtually no practice. Time constraints are an issue, but not too huge of one, so long as you are willing to trust your gut so to speak.
> The material tested in the US SATs is relatively unsophisticated compared to the curricula of many East Asian countries.
That is exactly why I think the SAT is superior.
Only if you are naturally highly intelligent. Folks of above average intelligence (but not in the upper percentiles) tend to need to work at it (many do and succeed).
> That is exactly why I think the SAT is superior.
Only if you are interested in "g" intelligence alone as a pure metric, in which case psychometric instruments like the Advanced Raven Progressive Matrices should also be admissible.
The SATs give you one metric of preparedness for college, arguably an important one. But the East Asian exams give you another: grit. It's much harder for a smart person to succeed at them without any effort. That said, I'm not condoning them since I believe the East Asian focus on exams often does go overboard and devolves into mismeasurement (i.e. how good you are at taking tests).
But intelligence, measured in isolation, is not a good metric for college-readiness especially in technical fields, where you need a certain measure of grit to do well in the material. I've known stars in high school who struggled when they had to apply themselves.... when you're used to things coming easily to you all your life, it can be demoralizing to have to work at things.
But to your other point about working hard only when it's needed, there is a class of skills (so called "bicycle skills" [1]) that have to be learned in advance, and cannot be picked up on the fly. Mastering those skills early in life can lead to compound interest payoffs later on. So I don't agree with YAGNI as a general rule.
Furthermore, even if the material you learn isn't going to be useful, it doesn't mean that the process of learning them is necessarily wasted. On the contrary, the process of acquiring mastery itself can pay dividends in the form of meta-skills. Take learning to play the piano for instance. The blogger "Ask a Korean" has this to say: [2]
"The point of learning the piano is NOT about acquiring the skill of playing the piano so that the student can earn a living as a pianist. It is about building the character of the person. Here is the thing about character -- you can't build it by explicitly setting out to build it. Character is not a skill like tying your shoelaces. If it must be put in terms of "skill", character is a "meta-skill" -- a foundational human skill that is necessary to perfect any number of mechanical skills. And the only way to develop this meta-skill is to develop at least one highly sophisticated mechanical skill, such that the student may acquire the meta-skill in the course of building the mechanical skill."
[1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/08/01/bicycle-skills/
[2] http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2011/05/confucianism-and-kore...
Interestingly, Korean public service exam is very similar to SAT in that it can be taken preparation-less (in fact, preparation-less-ness is an explicit design goal of the test) and similarly devoid of subject matter content.
Source: I took both Korean SAT and Korean public service exam.
As a highly educated person myself, I can't deny that studying, learning and improving yourselves are fundamental parts of the process of growing up and becoming a useful member of society, but it can't be done at the expense of someone's sanity, because it totally nullifies its value. Stuffing a kid of knowledge like a pâté goose stops him or her from really enjoying probably it's most critical years to the fullest, and I just can't really see this as a positive thing.
It wasn't because of natural resources or oil.
It wasn't any modern industry that just had to recover after the war such as Germany or Japan did. South Korea had NO modern industry of any kind, higher education institution, a modern workforce, effective government agencies, etc. S. Korea was literally a hell hole of a nation in 1953.
After the WTF period Koreans went through from 1910 to 1953 (after having had a 500 years long kingdom, the Chosun dynasty), South Korea just had to do what was necessary to survive.
And only way they saw how was producing a workforce to be productive. And no, Montessori method was not a viable option.
You don't have to be a highly educated non-Korean to see the education system is not quite right or wrong. Many highly educated and even not so highly educated people IN S. Korea know the question is valid to ask. Some want a change. Many who immigrated out of S. Korea to US and other nations list 2 reasons for leaving the nation, 1) conscription army and 2) the college entrance exam, the Suneung. But it was a system created at a time when there was no time to debate, but to act quickly to produce a workforce, just to survive as a nation. And it has delivered so far.
Yes the suicides are tragic. But consider this. Far more S. Koreans have died (including newborn, young, old) from lack of basic medical care in South Korea when only select few had access to modern medical care up until 1970's, 80's. The nation and citizens couldn't pay for it, for lack of wealth, from due to lack of skills needed by a modern workforce. But now that they can afford it, a nation wide medical care system is in place. Without educating the workforce (and yes the Suneung), they wouldn't have that luxury.
Easy for you to say they should be ashamed of that. I quite disagree.
After all, without Park Chung Hee's military dictatorship, without essentially enslaving 1/2 of the population as a glorified slave with the threat of violence, without handing over the destiny of millions of Koreans to the hands of the dozen family run corporate dynasties (aka chaebols), without the massacre and denial of reparations and the censure, capture, torture and killing of dissidents,
South Korea would not be as successful as it is.
Life in South Korea during the military dictatorship which lasted 2.5 generations, was just as hard if not oppressive like the North. If you read about the Gwangju Massacre (Korea's Tianmen Square), it's pretty clear that South Korea was virtually no different than North Korea in terms of political freedom.
This is the miracle of the Asian tigers - when you don't have natural commodity, the people become that commodity, expendable, something to be taken advantage of by people with capital.
I am not saying life in the late 60s and throughout 70s was equally oppressive on the full spectrum of society but it was nevertheless rigid, militant and thugs were used to suppress worker's union and human rights activists. You don't hear about the thousands of families who had suffered under Park and Chun, instead you only hear about the nominal GDP. If North Korea had the Kim family, South Korea had Republic of Korea, the country itself became an idolized almost humanized symbol of the state it was in-war torn, politically unstable, national security under constant threat and skirmishes from a nearby enemy. When you force people to stop and sing the national anthem everyday and arrest people for failing to comply, when you attempt to torture and assassinate political rivals (former president KDJ), when you enforce martial law and national curfew, when you dictate the consciousness of millions through a government run media, how is that not any different from the massive cult that North has built up? A cult built up on jingoism, the ends justify the means sort of approach, sure one could argue the sacrifice of that generation was necessary but for who's benefit? Ultimately, the profits and power only grew and consolidated under the handful of men and women who simply happened to be in a position to work with the government's generous credit loans to build the empire they dreamed of. Koreans today are not happy, students are killing themselves more than any other region, people don't want to raise kids, instead grow old like Japan.
My father was a journalist for a then military dictatorship run media outlet. He saw firsthand and told me stories of how the system worked and how it permeated through out the entire social hierarchy with impunity, no checks or balances, just pure straight up brainwashing.
The miracle of the Han river is red with the tears, sweat and blood of our forefathers who imagined a different type of Korea, one that isn't a glorified feudalism with smartphones that spy on the citizens, a military aiming their guns at the citizens, while the Samsung and the Hyundais happily go through generation after generation of brainwashed citizens who are reaching for that elusive "Korean Dream" through a institutionalized natural selection process that preaches neo-confucian values when in reality, it's a thin veil for the otherwise corrupt social hierarchy that dictates a person's age and seniority plays more importance then merit, competence and transparency.
The woke Koreans are the ones who are desperately trying to leave a country covered in fine dust pollution, where kids no longer play outside without a industrial mask, while the chaebol's offsprings are partying it up in prestigious American institutions in pristine clean neighborhoods.
This is the glorious post-ww2 Japanese model in which PCH has adhered to, with hopes of becoming an economic and a military power that is supposed to provide a roof over the citizens head that weathers through storms, instead it has largely become a state which coerced its citizens into working in squalor conditions to meet the material demands of the West with cheap labor.
"A perfect slave is the one who thinks he is free" couldn't be more true in South Korea.
Around where I am, I see plenty of western corporations doing above, even with plenty of natural commodity to extract from.
And no, you simply cannot compare Park Chung Hee with Kim of North Korea to be equally dictatorial/brutal/etc. You simply lose all credibility when you make that assertion, while discussing Korean affairs.
Education was the single most important factor for S. Korea. And successful introduction of market based economy too, how ever troublesome it was. But without educated, competent workforce, nothing will work.
Also, you stated that S. Korea's wealth improved due to enslaving half of the population, and chaebols being given control over affairs in S. Korea.
What about N. Korea? N. Korea enslaved the entire population, with complete control that the chaebols of S. Korea can only dream about. And look where N. Korea is now. Practically a beggar state.
33. Heritage is concerned with the ways in which very selective material artefacts, mythologies, memories and traditions become resources for the present. The contents, interpretations and representations of the resource are selected according to the demands of the present; an imagined past provides resources for a heritage that is to be passed onto an imagined future. It follows too that the meanings and functions of memory and tradition are defined in the present. Further, heritage is more concerned with meanings than material artefacts. It is the former that give value, either cultural or financial, to the latter and explain why they have been selected from the near infinity of the past. In turn, they may later be discarded as the demands of present societies change, or even, as is presently occurring in the former Eastern Europe, when pasts have to be reinvented to reflect new presents. Thus heritage is __________________. [3 points]
① about preserving universal cultural values
② a mirror reflecting the artefacts of the past
③ neither concerned with the present nor the future
④ as much about forgetting as remembering the past
⑤ a collection of memories and traditions of a society
When I took the GREs in 2008, I received a 480 on the verbal section (which was bad given I was applying to PhD programs), and a perfect 6/6 on the written section. I actually didn't qualify for a handful of programs, because they required ESL students to achieve 500 or greater (so I was below what a non-english speaker needs to score, and I spoke english as a first language). So, somehow I was an excellent writer, but had poor verbal skills.
It's remarkable that we test people against this style of language, both domestically in the US and abroad, given the unlikeliness someone will ever stumble across this type of prose. And, if you do, you should really ask the writer why they're trying to be so convoluted in their argument.
Forget that; I'm a native English speaker, with a college degree, and I have no clue what they're looking for. Maybe 5? But that's only a guess.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. It appears that in order to force everybody on a normal distribution map, they've gone well past the original purpose of the government exams, which was originally a neo-Confucian artifact to promote egalitarianism-the idea that even peasants who pass the government exams are able to improve their social standing after a long period of caste society based on lineage.
This means students aren't tested even on rote memorization or any of the necessary skills in the real world. Instead, they've become victim to the billion dollar industry of extra-cirricular cram schools. Public schools have become completely dependent on a widely unregulated cram schools because it's become impossible to come out on top when everybody is getting specialized help. You can't fault these parents either, these exams are insane and it makes sense that there is demand for extra tutoring.
The biggest tragedy of this is that it's no longer egalitarian like in it's tradition, it's about who has the money and can pay for their child's education. Low middle class Korean families can't support the cost of raising a child in this hyper education focused culture with very little prouductivity other than elevating the truly gifted exam takers running the country with no experience other than from books.
A big reason why in South Korea, you can commit horrible crimes and almost get a slap on the wrist because of incompetent, unexperienced judges and prosecutors who have mastered the art of climbing the Korean ladder, a giant bureaucracy that permeates through every part of Korean culture. Neo-confucianism is facing significant stress and young Koreans are undergoing social change.
If my answer is wrong that would indeed be ironic... I'd love to be corrected.