Lessons from the Buddha and the Sewol Disaster about Living in the Moment

I thought I'd focus on a theme that bears some relation to topics I have written about recently as well as a little more regarding the Sewol disaster, and that is the quality of life of teenagers in Korea.

One thing that makes this whole disaster possibly even more upsetting is the number of young people who were the victims of it, mostly high school students.

The tragic death of a student at my school a couple of months ago got me thinking how much of his short life seems to have been based on studying very hard for a future he will now sadly never experience.  Now, with the horrors of the Sewol disaster as well, this has hit me with even sharper focus.  I wonder whether the young survivors of the disaster will now look at their lives rather differently and strive for a richer life in the present and not simply search for their (or their parents) ideal future.

I am often saddened by the amount of times I ask the question, "What did you do this weekend?", to my students (of a range of ages across all the jobs I've had in Korea, but most recently my high school students) and their answer, even in the school holidays, is "Study".  I used to have a private student, of 13 years old, who spent 12 hours every Sunday in the library, and the vast majority of his waking hours on every other day of the week studying as well - not by choice I might add - and his situation was not unique.

In recent history, many people in the West have looked to the East for answers about how to live the good life and be happy, and specifically they have often looked to Buddhism to show the way (my own cousin can be named among these people).  The West's focus on material possessions, money and building for a better future are all called into question by a belief system that focuses on relinquishing the material and an inner peace in the here and now, rather than dwelling on the past or putting too much emphasis on a dream of a better future. Right here and now is all we really have, yet most people's attention is firmly rooted in the past or the future, never really appreciating the present moment.   I, like many people perhaps, often find myself looking forward too much and not enjoying the present enough.

I am no expert on, or a follower of, Buddhism, and I believe most of its claims to be bogus, but one thing I am not sceptical about is the value of practices like meditation to enlighten ourselves about the here and now and the importance of it and taking time to try and rid ourselves of the plethora of thoughts and worries buzzing around in our heads.

Despite Korea being a country with strong Buddhist traditions and a great deal of temples dotted around its mountainous landscape, Korean society appears to have totally lost touch with some of the principles of Buddhism that could really do it a lot of good.

Ironically, I have heard a number of Korean people criticising Western culture for being overly materialistic, but Korea is a place that values material wealth more than any other place I have ever visited.  It is also a culture obsessed with the future. People are always searching for a perfect tomorrow; to go to a good university, to get a good job, to get married, to have children, to help pay for their parents retirement, etc. Now we all do this to a degree, but many Koreans take this to the extreme and pressurise young people into thinking about their futures all the time in a very inflexible and expectant way, hence the crazy education culture, the general lack of sleep, and all those hours of hard work and study.

From my viewpoint, my hope is that the Sewol disaster might just serve to give Korea as a nation a wake up call (although I'm not terribly optimistic); not just about practices regarding safety, but as a reminder that all of us are just one second away to our ends, one step away from walking in front of a bus, one diagnosis away from falling terminally ill, and one journey away from never returning.  If this happens to us at any age, could we look back on our lives and say it was all worthwhile, that we lived as good a life as possible, or even simply that we enjoyed life while we had it?

We all need to plan for the future to some extent, but when I think of the all the high school students on that ferry my thoughts turn to just what the last few years of their lives would have been like.  If they are anything like the students I have come to know in Korea, most of their time will have been spent with their heads in books, night and day, and being pressured by parents and teachers to prepare for a tomorrow that might never actually come.  Korea is now an economically wealthy, well-developed country, isn't it about time it used this fact to make the people happier and aid them in living more fulfilling lives?  It feels like this aspect of the disaster has been somewhat ignored, so far at least.  With any luck at some point in the near future, the next time a young person dies, their short time on this earth won't seem to be as poorly spent when much greater happiness and life experiences were possible.

Korean Teenagers and Well-Being

Over the past two years or so I have written frequently about what a stressful and depressing life Korean teenagers are having in Korea, so it was to my surprise that South Korea came third recently in a study of well-being in teenagers from different countries.

In the linked article above, I do think the title is a little deceptive, in that although well-being and happiness are linked, they are not the same.  I would argue strongly that South Korea is not an example of a country with especially happy teenagers, and I'm sure many would be on my side.  Korea's notorious suicide statistics and a recent poll finding that about half of all teenagers have contemplated suicide, would also seem to contradict the notion that South Korean teenagers are the third happiest in the world.

It is interesting to see how the study was compiled and how it favoured Korea in the parameters it measured:

"To create the index, the researchers looked at 40 indicators to assess "citizen participation, economic opportunity, education, health, information and communications technology (ICT), and safety and security" among the world's youth (defined as people 12 to 24)."

Listed in among the factors quoted are some of the really fantastic things about Korea. There is no doubt that in some departments Korea has done many things right, especially the last three; health (in young people), ICT, and safety and security.  General organisation and efficiency in Korea is also something I find much better than in many countries, particularly my own.  Life for teenagers in Korea is certainly convenient, well-organised, and relatively free from dangerous temptations and situations.

However, the problem with fairly narrow studies like this is the lack of attention to detail and the message it may send out.  Education is a perfect example; while I am sure Korea scored highly for education (it regularly tops world league tables), Korean education of the young is something that significantly contributes to unhappiness.  One can't help but also notice that if you keep students cooped-up in a classroom all day (and on many occasions, all-night), of course they'll be safer.  Just like house cats have less danger and tend to live longer than those that are given free reign to go outside and come and go as they please.  But what kind of cat would you rather be?

Economic opportunities is another thing to be careful in making assumptions about happiness, because while Koreans do have opportunities and in my experience finding a job is much easier (for Koreans and non-Koreans) than in my own country (Korea has the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD), work life in Korea is stressful.  Koreans work some of the longest hours, taking away time with family and friends and time for relaxation. Hierarchies at work also cause troubles, giving their bosses too much control of their lives.  Young people are always at the bottom of these hierarchies, often leading to the worst of working conditions, and the lowest levels of respect and job satisfaction.

But even if it was crystal clear that South Korea was doing a better job than most other countries with regard to the well-being of its youth, does this mean it is doing good enough?

What has always fascinated me about Korea is that its problems are so obvious, and what's more Koreans are so aware of the problems they have in their society, they just seem powerless or unwilling to change them.  It is not a question of Johny foreigner coming over here and noticing the problems they can't see, in my experience very few Koreans are ignorant of the issues they have in society.

In a heartbeat South Korean society could make things so much better for young people if they simply took some of the weight off their shoulders.  The obsessive compulsive nature of education in Korea is the major culprit of unhappiness.

Even small steps would make a great difference; students could still study long hours for example, just give them less homework and encourage more sleep.  As I said in last week's post, why are Korean high school students sleeping only 4 or 5 hours a night? Surely, a healthy amount of sleep would improve their performance and make them happier at the same time.

The study on well-being actually does show some huge positives for the way Korean society has been organised.  Korea is so close to being a place that is really great to live.  There are many ways in which Korea trumps other places in the world to live, but fails in ways that are so unnecessary it becomes frustrating to be a part of it all.

In my own personal opinion, there are a few key issues that would really make Korea a wonderful place to live if they could change their ways slightly:

1. A less rigid adherence to respect culture hierarchies.
2. A greater respect for worker's rights (and individual rights generally).
3. Less concern with petty status games and jealousy.
4. Being less OCD when it comes to education.
5. Being less nationalistic.
6. Enforcing laws (e.g. traffic laws).

Korea has always struck me as a nation of extremes in these regards; it would only take a little adjustment of each of these factors and one might see Korea rising to the top of more positive tables and statistics, like those concerned with well-being, and lifting off the bottom of the less desirable measures of societies, like suicides.

Anti-Education and My 50% Success Rate at Answering Korean English Exam Questions

So, I am an Englishman flown in to South Korea to help educate their young in English.  In my school my level of English is obviously unmatched (I am English after-all) so why is it I am so bad at answering English exam questions in Korea?

Perhaps I only ever get asked about the tricky questions, or maybe I am just a dumbass, but it turns out that I am right about 50% of the time in my estimation.  In many ways it is embarrassing, why can't a reasonably well educated native English speaker, from England, who has spoken, read, listened and wrote in English all his life, answer questions correctly in a country where the overall level of English is poor (this is not a criticism, just simply that English is not their first language)?

You can get an idea of the type of questions that come-up in the college entrance exam (the big one) here at Ask a Korean.  They are not easy.

Personally, I was intrigued by a couple of things recently.  I have just finished correcting about 40 essays for our innugral and now annual school English newspaper.  The vast majority of them are sound efforts indeed - much better than I could do in Korean - however, they are riddled with mistakes as you might expect.  Sometimes it becomes very frustrating to check because the meaning is so difficult to grasp without actually going through the essay with the student who wrote it.

One of the few teachers in my school I have the ability to be honest and candid with, asked me to check one such essay the other week.  After a while of struggling through it, she asked me what I thought; I said it was fairly similar to all the others I had checked.  In reply, she said that the original piece was by a student at our school, but which had almost totally been re-written by her brother, who has just finished high school.  I replied that it was still difficult to understand and she remarked that her brother just received a perfect score in his English college entrance exam.  Shocked, I asked her honestly how this was possible and her reply was that the exam is all about reading and listening and not speaking and writing.  I guess we all knew this, but it really did bring home just how messed-up the system of learning English in Korea really is.  The kid got a perfect score in the biggest exam in the country at English, yet his essay was all over the place and was not what you'd expect from someone who just aced a very difficult English exam.

One of my perennial gripes with education in all countries is teaching to the test and in Korea they have perhaps hit the pinnacle of "excellence" in this regard.  Tests are not completely useless and I suspect in subjects like mathematics and mainly theoretical subjects, they are valuable as tools, not only for assessment, but for motivation a well.  In regard to English, though, I can't imagine a worse thing to be doing.

My colleague's brother had been taught for years and years and spent countless hours studying to pass a Korean English test and not to how to use and communicate in that language.  The tests and the education system that surround them are to get into universities, period, they serve no other purpose.  In terms of communication, every student in Korea would be better off spending 3-6 months in an English speaking country learning English, rather than 14 years in a Korean classroom.  I really do believe this, I'm not over-stating things, and I can't help but think that this waste of time is almost immoral.

I will give an example of a question passed to me the other day by another English teacher at my school.  Answer the following question by giving the correct response:

A: Can you tell me why you were so upset?
B: ___________________________________________________

1. I got some money for good grades.
2. I got the book I wanted for my birthday.
3. I'm angry because my brother broke my MP3 player.
4. I feel happy because I won first prize in the contest.
5. I couldn't sleep enough because I had to prepare for an exam.

Got it?

Actually, this is an example of quite an easy question; it can only really be two answers 3 or 5 and 3 is in the wrong tense, so it must be 5.  On first attempt, however, I slipped-up here.  Again, maybe I was just being a dumbass, but I think it part of the reason is because of a profound difference in the way Koreans see the English language and how English speakers see the language.  English speakers are communicating in English and therefore I think the relation between upset and angry is far stronger than upset and tired.  Everyday English conversation teachers all over Korea receive responses from students to verbal questions like this; i.e. that are perfectly understandable but have errors of grammar, like answer 3, and I personally grasp what Koreans are trying to say to me, even though they make simple tense errors like this.  My wife's English was not perfect in the same sense when I first met her and for quite a while after, but she was an excellent communicator and easy to understand.

The amazing thing is that probably 95% of my high school students would not be able to even give the incorrect response that's understandable, let alone give a spoken response with perfect grammar.  Only about 5% can achieve a speaking or writing ability good enough to get their thoughts across in any meaningful way, but I bet the majority of students answered the above question correctly. 

I have the sneaking suspicion that if I took the college entrance exam, I would not get a perfect score and probably would not even be in the top 10% of students.  I would love to see an experiment done on foreign teachers in Korea to this effect, I think it could be very revealing.

The ignoring of the spoken and written aspects of the English language in Korean exams is a telling one because it is speaking and writing that are the creative and interactive elements.  I think that creativity and interaction are things that Korean culture as a whole are exquisitely uncomfortable with, especially in a classroom situation.  Creativity involves individuality and interaction may involve disagreement and possible embarrassment, especially when another language is being used.  Korean culture has always appeared to me somewhat ill at ease with the concepts of individuality, disagreement, and embarrassment and many Koreans strain to avoid all three over and above what obviously occurs in Western culture also, but in smaller doses (mainly in disagreement and embarrassment).  Korean students are comfortable sitting quietly and passively in class with their heads in their books and listening to their elders/teachers bark instructions and information at them.  Korean teachers and parents are also very cozy and content with this situation.

The fact that the Korean education system doesn't confront the clear issues in its culture and education of the young regarding these factors is a local symptom of what education has become world-wide.  What is driving it are the ideas of conformity, tolerance, the fear of failure, meeting targets, societal values, and saving face.  I would argue this is not education but anti-education.  If you only ever do things that are inside your comfort zone, how can you ever truly grow?  It's like going to the gym and never increasing the weights you lift, the reps you do or the time and resistance on the bike, rowing or running machine.

What I see all over the world is the teaching of youngsters to conform to other's wishes and views (not necessarily always bad), to be concerned about the idea of free expression in favour of tolerance and to have a fear of failure that is reinforced by never taking students out of their comfort zones and by continuous testing.

What is knowledge of a language good for if it is not to communicate with it?  Korean education is so caught-up in understanding all the little nuances and academia with it as well as saving face by not speaking it, it ignores the whole purpose.  I see the same thing in science education, which I trained in as a teacher, in England; everyone was so caught-up in teaching the facts and doing experiments with Bunsen burners that everyone ignored the whole point of science, to ask questions and to be in wonder and awe of the world around us.  I can't remember any wonder or awe from my school science classes when I was younger and there was no wonder, creativity or questions raised in my science classes when I taught either.  All that was required of me was to whizz through all the facts and the silly practical skills in the syllabus as quickly as I could to fit them into the school year and to make sure they missed nothing for their exams.  If I digressed to explore something in greater depths or answered questions that went off at interesting tangents from the class topic, I was chastised for it by the teachers that were "training me" to be a better teacher. 

This is anti-education, but it is what passes as education and it really elevates my blood pressure.

Apparently, Korea sits at number 2 behind Finland in countries with the best education systems.  I think really this is nonsense, the wording needs changing; Korea actually is number 2 in schooling, not education because if there was ever a land that matched the following quote from Mark Twain more closely, I haven't heard of it:

"Don't let your schooling interfere with your education" - Mark Twain

Sound advice, which people in all countries should take note of, especially Koreans.


Note: I think this post goes quite nicely with a great piece written by "the Boss" over at wangjangnim.com http://wangjangnim.com/what-it-is-all-about