Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2011; its figures on South Korean government spending on education, family spending on private academies and students sent to US universities are from around that time.
We have talked a lot about the American university system, but if you look at universities in the rest of the world (Singapore, Sweden, Finland…), it becomes perfectly clear why in Spain we dream of becoming civil servants (a secure job for life in the public sector), while all these countries, South Korea included, produce great entrepreneurs.
Sunwoong Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and president of the Korean-American University Professors Association, was interviewed about South Korea’s education system and, more importantly, about the Korean mindset regarding what really matters. It all starts with discipline, something that is lacking in Spain. In Korea there is an old saying: “Respect your teacher so much that you do not even step on his shadow.” In South Korea it would be unthinkable for a parent to go and threaten a teacher. In fact, it is unthinkable for a parent even to dare raise their voice to a teacher. Starting from that small premise (which marks a huge difference from our system), we move on to the following points.
1. Why such respect for teachers?
To begin with, the teacher is a very different figure in South Korea: someone who chose teaching as a vocation, to pass on their knowledge, not as a civil-service career. In fact, the civil servant as such does not exist in Eastern culture, because a public employee only has to make one mistake to be punished with dismissal, without being defended even by their own colleagues. In South Korea, honour comes before even life itself.
See also: 5 reasons not to look for a job and to start your own business instead
That is why, for a student, the teacher becomes their “sensei”, the person responsible for giving them the knowledge they need to make something of themselves, and from before they are old enough to reason, students are expected to push themselves beyond their limits in order to compete.
2. Life is a competition
The sooner you teach a child that life is a constant competition, the sooner they will be ready to compete: competing to be top of the class, competing for a job, competing to put their company ahead of the rest, and even learning the art of war applied to life, because life is about devising strategies. A person without a clearly defined strategy from an early age is a person without direction, or someone who will find their way later on but will already have lost a great deal of time.
3. The first competition: getting into the best university
In South Korea, the first goal a young person has to reach in life is to get into the best university possible, so it is no coincidence that South Korea is one of the countries that “exports” the most university students abroad. What’s more, the top universities in the United States compete for South Korean students to choose them.
In return, the young student promises to study not in order to become an employee of a big corporation, but to own one: to go back home, build a company, give work to thousands of people and later go out and “invade” new markets. Nor is it a coincidence that the East is conquering the American and European markets.
4. If you’re top of the class, you’ll be top in life
In South Korea, coming second means you head the list of losers. There is no silver or bronze medal for a Korean, and at the Olympic Games we have seen how winning a bronze medal did not make Koreans celebrate, because they hadn’t really won.
Education matters so much in South Korea that the country has the most demanding university entrance exams on the planet, designed to make sure that only capable, well-prepared people get in. As for how well prepared they are, consider that 60% of Koreans have a university degree.
5. Education, preparation and more education
The South Korean government spends almost 7% of GDP on education. Even this large investment is not enough for Korean families, however: public schools, although free, receive donations from the families themselves. And that’s not all: 90% of Korean families spend an average of around 400 euros a month on private academies outside school hours.
The government even tried to ban private tuition in the 1980s, but in Korea everything is about constantly surpassing yourself, and if you have to work harder than your rival to win, then that is what you do.
Korea’s competitive spirit has often been criticised; at times we have seen 7-year-old children shut away to train to represent their country at the Olympic Games, leading a life stricter than that of the US Army itself. But in Korea, take away the constant competition and you take away their reason for being.
If we managed to bring even a tenth of that spirit of competition and self-improvement into our own culture, something would change, and surely for the better.
Featured image: jgmarcelino, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
