South Koreans Hit the Books and the Payoff Is Impressive

Americans are wont to think of South Korea as an underdeveloped nation where GIs died in such abominable places as Pork Chop Hill to make the nation safe for the “democracy” of a series of dictators, from Singman Rhee to Chun Doo Hwan. Then, during the last few years, they have had the Korean “economic miracle” implode on their consciousness. Now comes the startling capitulation of the latest and perhaps last of these autocratic rulers to the demands for constitutional revisions, a capitulation that on the surface may seem inexplicable to people who do not have an understanding of the Korean experience.

Yet both the economic miracle and the political miracle are founded on a solid and solemn commitment by the Korean people: a dedication to education. It is a lesson that not only U.S. foreign-policy planners would do well to ponder; it is also one that the American people should study on their own account.

In the modernizing but still Confucian Korean society, education plays a much larger and more important role than in American life. It will probably come as a shock, and should come as a shock, to Americans who have prided themselves on being among the best and most widely educated people in the world that within a generation a previously underdeveloped nation has surpassed them. The Korean literacy rate of 95%-98% among young people is higher than the American; 80% to 85% of Korean 19-year-olds are high-school graduates--a higher percentage than the American. Almost as many Koreans as Americans, in relative terms, go to college, and more would go except for the rigid limits that the government has set until now.

Unlike the current American teen-ager who fantasizes becoming a pro athlete or a rock star, Korean parents and youths alike focus on education as the way up. The Korean Horatio Alger story is about the poor kid from the country getting into Seoul National or Yonsei University.

It is a yearning that built up and was stifled for centuries under Chinese and Japanese domination and suppression. Although Sunggyungwan, the Confucian university, traces its roots back 500 years, the Japanese, who occupied Korea from 1905 to 1945, permitted only handfuls of Koreans to achieve a higher education. Before that period, during the latter part of the 19th Century, it was Western missionaries, mostly American, who conducted elementary and literacy classes so that their converts might be able to read the Bible.

With liberation, the entire populace grasped at the opportunity for education. Yonsei University, which my great-grandfather founded as Chosen Christian College in 1915, has grown from fewer than 1,000 to 30,000 students. The U.S. presence in Korea and attendance at American universities by numerous Korean students have had significant influence, yet the Koreans have not just absorbed the American education experience but have elaborated on it.

Teachers and professors are held in higher esteem. Although professorial salaries are, in absolute terms, only about half those in the United States, relatively they stand considerably further up on the salary ladder. Students are pampered. The house is arranged so that they may study undisturbed. Mothers arise at 4 a.m. to prepare breakfast for them. As the symbol of the nation’s future, an almost mystical aura has attached to them. They are regarded not merely as representatives of an emerging, strong middle class--with which 80% of Koreans now identify themselves--but as the coming leadership elite. There are more economists with Ph.D.s earned in American universities in the South Korean government than there are in the U.S. federal government.

Given the prestige with which students are endowed and their history of activism--the tradition of student demonstrations, as a kind of political criticism, dates back to the era of the Korean monarchy--the nation was shocked when it was revealed in January that a student activist, Park Chong Chol, had been tortured to death by police. The police atrocity was seen as an attack on the very fabric of the nation. Students took to the streets to demonstrate. After the government indicated that there would be no movement toward change or democratization, support for the students became widespread. People applauded the marchers and supplied them with food and drink. Mothers’ groups raised banners. Buddhist monks and Christian clergy joined in. The government was reluctant to aggravate the alienation and create further martyrs by vigorous suppression. Although it might not have been immediately apparent, the psychological balance of power had shifted to the students.

The economic miracle had its beginnings when the first cohort of American-educated students returned in the 1960s and began applying their knowledge to South Korean industry. The spread of education, combined with the economic updraft that this precipitated, has created a solid, literate middle class open to ideas and restive to translate them into an input in shaping the nation’s future. Thus the scope of the demonstration grew from protest to demand for the creation of participatory democracy--a sequence of events that shows just how powerful an engine for democracy education can be.