This week marks a month and a half for us in Korea and we hope that our friends and family (those who still read this blog) can tell from our posts that we are happy, healthy and settling in nicely. We really feel like we have hit the lottery with our jobs and with the life we lead, but we would be remiss to say that there is not a whole lot about our lives here that we also find aggravating, perplexing, frustrating, exasperating and just plain backward. The following post is a bit long and no one should feel pressured to read it word for word. Mostly it has just helped me work out some of my confusion and frustration and understand that many of the problems I have come across in these two months are bigger than myself and thus beyond my control.

Society

The problems that we have seen in Korea arise out of a strange mixture of ancient patriarchal traditions (South Korea is the most confucian country in Asia), and—almost unbelievably—putting too much import in modern education. Education is an extremely competitive and cutthroat business here in South Korea. In this country, a single test is the determining factor for college admissions, which affects the entire course of one’s life—including earning potential, social status, and even marriage prospects. From the very beginning of school, creative thinking is stifled in order to focus more thoroughly on intense rote memorization. Many of our students thus have a very difficult time discussing their own personal opinions about anything and are only interested in obtaining the answers and moving on to their next obligation.

The second problem that we have faced here involves the conservative nature of South Korean society, but that is inextricably tied to the education system as well. When I first got to Korea, one of the other teachers warned me about the mothers of our students. She told me that mothers usually take to male teachers better because their husbands work ridiculously long hours—sometimes six days a week—and male teachers serve as a kind of stand-in father figure for their children who are either in school or at piano-swimming-badminton-soccer-dance-math-english-and-or-science academy from 9am until after midnight.

The women in South Korea are thus not only expected to be overly interested in their kids schooling, but they don’t have much else to do anyway. Personally, I have been asked many times by curious children why, if I am in fact married, I have to work outside the house and why I don’t have any children myself. Apparently they learn from an early age that life revolves entirely around children and ensuring at any cost that those children are a success—because failure at anything reflects shame on the entire family.

School

On a practical level, these strands of Korean society entangle themselves in our work lives every day. For example, Monday mornings we have short staff meetings before class with the directors of both the kindergarten and primary programs. Last week, we were told by Julianne, the kindergarten directior, to make sure that our four, five and six year old kindergarteners had completed every page and problem in their workbooks—every single one! Furthermore she told us that she wants us to write something nice on every single page because many of the parents call and complain when their child hasn’t finished every problem or it looks like the teacher isn’t paying attention. I understand that most of the parents don’t speak English, and that they are paying a lot of money to make sure their children can, and that the only way they have of assessing things is to look at the book work.

Yet these kind of demands actually undermine our ability to teach. The administration knows that the parents can’t really tell from the book how much their kids are learning, and so to them it doesn’t matter if the teachers basically have to fill in the answers for them, so long as it appears like the children are doing it. Neither the parents or the administrators seem to respect that fact that all these demands leave very little room for any actual teaching never mind finding extra time for those children who really need it—not when each parent feels like their child is entitled to a little more consideration than everybody else’s. It often reminds me of the opening lines in Roald Dahl’s Matilda (still one of my favorite books ever):

It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think he or she is wonderful. Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius. Well, there’s nothing very wrong with all this. It’s the way of the world. It’s only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, “Bring us a basin! We’re going to be sick!” School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their own back when the time comes to write their end-of-term reports. If I were a teacher, I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents. “Your son Maximilian,” I would write, “is a total wash-out. I hope you have a family business you can push him into when he leaves school because he sure as heck won’t get a job anywhere else.” Or, if I were feeling lyrical that day, I might write, “It is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing organs in the sides of their abdomen. Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she’s learnt this term, has no hearing organs at all.”

Unfortunately for us, we have very little recourse when it comes to writing reports, which are often augmented or censored by the Korean-speaking TAs to appease the parents. So while Roald Dahl’s comments may seem a little harsh, I should mention that we love our kids—it is the parents with whom we take issue. Anyway, the point is that I am beginning to see his point.

The children

On a more serious note, the problem is not that these parents all see their children as some sort of exception to the rule. The problem is that some of the parents have transfered this belief to their children and now these children not only feel entitled to more of everything, but also feel tremendous pressure to live up to their parents’ expectations. When these expectations come crashing to earth in the form of a bad test grade or a University rejection letter, things can get ugly.

There is a little girl in one of my primary classes—I’ll call her M. She is a tiny, sweet, and funny child, and while all my kids seem to care about school, she always seems extra concerned about her performance in class. I had been warned about her mother from some of the Korean TAs. Once, when she got a particularly bad score on a vocab test she looked at me and said, “Teacher, my mom…,” trailed off and then drew her finger across her throat like a knife. I didn’t really think much of this to begin with. I knew her mother was intense but I figured M would get scolded and grounded for a few days and would study a little harder next time.

But then this week, M was sitting next to me and after she turned in her test, she tapped me on the shoulder, groaned, and stammered in broken English, “Teacher, me zero, I go home and my mom…” she then made a series of fast paced punching motions with her fist in the air. Taken aback, I looked at her and asked “M, does your mom hit you!?” She murmured something that sounded like assent and then began drawing a little stick figure with lines spewing from its mouth (screaming). Needless to say, I was fighting back tears as I went to turn in the kid’s tests for grading. When I got the test scores back and saw that M had scored a 50%, I looked at her and said “M, you are very very smart, you know that right?” She shrugged her shoulders and turned back to her work.

While I am sure the vast majority of parents at our school are not like this, we are learning that incidences of physical and mental abuse are by no means rare in this country. After my day with M, I did some research online and found that South Korea does not have a well developed Child Protective Services program. In this country corporal punishment in schools and at home is widely condoned and intrusions into other people’s family life are made only reluctantly. The bar at which it becomes necessary for the public to get involved in any domestic matter is much much higher here than it is in the US.

Our role

Considering all these things, how do we personally try to avoid perpetuating this system that produces such overworked and overprivileged children? In some ways, we have to admit that we are an inherent part of the problem, as two among many many foreign teachers in Korea—most of whom come here in search of easy employment, a comfortable paycheck, and little else—but we also know that leaving won’t really ameliorate the situation either. We need and love this job (most of it) and if we were to leave, our kids might be left with new teachers who would be all too happy to play by the rules.

So instead of grand gestures, we have to assuage our burning consciences by making time to teach and foster creativity in between all the administrative and parental B.S. For my part, I think the most meaningful thing I can do for these kids is try and impress upon them my belief that test scores are not the most important things in the universe and that kindness and empathy are far more impressive virtues than intelligence. I am afraid, however, that in this kind of fiercely competitive environment, where the college to which one is admitted is basically a valuation of one’s worth as a human being, this simply isn’t true—or at the very least—it’s a tough sell.