Into Darkness - Extreme Exam Culture

"Beware the Ides of March" by all means but September is never a dull month in any country. In Germany it is the month of the Oktoberfest - nothing less than the holy grail of the calendar year for many. Of course these days the event has been successfully exported worldwide including to both North and South Korea.

Bavarian colours redesigned with military chic.
Capitalising on NK's very highly rated brewing skills, Kim JungUn gave his personal nod 
to a 20 day beer festival in 2016, which is now an annual event in Pyongyang.

https://www.i4u.com/2016/08/114354/north-korea-has-first-oktoberfest

Seoul's Grand Hilton Hotel Oktoberfest:
more lederhosen and fewer starched uniforms than our friends in the north

Meanwhile in the more romantic nations of Europe, September sees a slothful return to work following August's closure of schools, small businesses, consultants, etc, to enable the merchants and professionals to rekindle their passions somewhere secluded. 

Alas for most students in the northern hemisphere, September reluctantly heralds the start of the new academic year and in Korea, it is the final count down to Seunung, the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) held each Thursday in the second week of November. This is an 8 hour long national marathon of a selection test in which approx 600,000 students compete for positions at university. The importance of this test is difficult to overstate because of the widely held (and largely self-perpetuating) belief that selection to the best university puts you above your peers socially and provides a roadmap to success for the rest of your entire life. To reinforce the gravity of the exam, police control traffic on the day to ensure everyone arrives at school on time, military exercises and civilian flights are postponed to reduce distractions, meanwhile stock markets, banks and govt offices open late to allow parents to burn the midnight oil with their kid the night before.

https://www.economist.com/banyan/2013/11/08/point-me-at-the-sky

Today more than ever, across the world and especially in South Korea (whose OECD ranking for graduation rates leaped from #34 to #1 in only 30 years) school and exams are a test of endurance rather than a test of intelligence or a useful foundation for a career. Students learn the facts and are then tested on how much they can remember. Likewise teachers teach-to-the-test; they coach the students on the type of questions they will be asked and the answers to reply with. This seduces some with the inviting short cut of learning only the questions and the respective model answers rather than learning the basic material. These students are quickly revealed when they leave the room 20 minutes into a 3 hour exam because the questions do not include the ones they learned. 

For the last 4 years South Korea has been #1 worldwide
for high school and college graduation rates.
This prompts the Whitehouse to ask what can the USA learn from  SK ?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-can-the-us-learn-from-south-koreas-education-system/

Defiance

In 2012 a UK teacher proudly confided that she would refuse to implement the govt exams for 6 year olds in her class. She explained that her students were too young to be stressed by exams and that school is for learning and fun. Furthermore it is unfair to assess anyone based on their performance in one particular hour. A listener noted that when they become adults, her class will be regularly assessed, accepted or rejected in much less than an hour, often in just a few seconds.  This will happen every time they walk into a meeting, attend a job interview or introduce themselves to a potential date at a party. As the saying goes; "You don't get a second chance to make a first impression", so why try to avoid the inevitable ?  Why not become good at it by regular practice ? 

May 2016: UK teachers, parents and children protesting against national exams for 6 year olds

The noble teacher might consider that in former times the Korean education system included exams for entrance to middle school and then again for entrance to high school.  Due to grueling pressure on the students, the middle school exam was abolished in 1971. However this simply increased the stakes riding on the high school exam.  Competition in the high school exam then became so feverishly fraught that it was replaced by a lottery system for allocating school places. Ultimately both of these 'fixes' combined to shift all the pressure further along the system making November's Seunung the single, defining, make-or-break, absolute cliff-hanger of a student's application to university. 

http://undergraduatelibrary.org/system/files/Schooling%20%26%20Culture%20-%20South%20Korean%20Education%20System.pdf

Real Life
At school I recall learning how to calculate the inclination of a cannon set at distance S so that a cannon ball fired with velocity V hit would hit the top of a castle keep at height H. I'd like to think that I could do the same calculation today, which would indeed be a fine test of memory. In real life it is astonishingly rare to be given such a well-defined problem to solve and if you are that lucky then computing the answer is rarely difficult. 

An age old maths problem; the ballistic trajectories of cannon balls
- until 2017 also used notoriously by Kim JungUn for launching ICMBs into the Pacific

Real life problems are poorly defined at best and often hidden at worst; they require analytical skills. The first is observation; recognising that there is a problem with a business unit, a production line or a project is a very subtle skill. The second is investigation; correctly identifying which factors contribute to the problem as opposed to other issues which have no influence. Observation and investigation simply define the problem. Then come the follow-up skills; finding options and choosing a solution. Even the best schools and the most hotly contested universities have been excruciatingly slow at coaching future generations in the analytical skills needed for real challenges. The DAX, NYSE & FTSE are littered with examples of businesses which collapsed because nobody recognised anything was wrong (eg: Lehman Bros) or because a company achieved technical supremacy and/or market share with a product for which there was no longer a demand (eg: Kodak). 

Koreans themselves are scratching their heads over this dilemma, noting that despite Korea's #1 ranking for graduates in the OECD, Korea has yet to win a single Nobel prize in sciences.  Commentators identify rote learning as a likely culprit for stifling creative thinking together with the parents' unbalanced obsession with the reputation of certain universities rather than the subject their child will actually study. 

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2018/09/181_254202.html

http://www.theasian.asia/archives/99165

Returning to the example of the cannon; relevant questions to ask before lighting the gunpowder might include; what makes an artillery attack preferable to undermining the walls, starving out the defenders or better still, confusing the incumbents by rocking up in a huge wooden horse ? Also, are non-adversarial strategies feasible such as starting rebellion among the defenders, converting them into allies or subverting the loyalty of an under-appreciated gatekeeper by offering him a quiet farmhouse with a few sheep tended by a Nordic shepherdess ?

Nordic shepherdess : offers a discrete alternative to military bombardment 

The analytical skills needed to detect and define problems then assess feasible solutions are hard to teach, harder to test and even harder to evaluate objectively. Therefore the education system blithely stumbles on, testing what students can remember; not because this constitutes a good education but simply because exams are easy to operate and everyone receives a standardised  little score for easy comparison.  

Work life
Analytical skills are similarly hard to teach, test and evaluate in a working environment. But rather than admit to the fallacy of annual performance reviews, HR gurus continue to ply their trade by annually launching the latest reincarnation of their review process which is invariably tweaked, overhauled or rebooted to include some enlightening mantra 'pinched with pride' from some uncredited business class in-flight magazine.

It is no surprise that many major corporations shed the yolk of performance reviews as they stepped into the 21st century, starting with tech companies like Dell, Microsoft and IBM but then joined by consultants such as Deloitte, PWC and Accenture, then industries such as GAP, Lear and General Electric.

https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-performance-management-revolution


https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/ahead-of-the-curve-the-future-of-performance-management

https://qz.com/428813/ge-performance-review-strategy-shift/


Sadly Korean chaebols are generally operated like military units with decisions made by Human Resources rather than managers. Here the annual performance review is essentially abused since the manager is unable to freely score individuals according to merit. Instead the HR dept. proscribes the spread of people who can be scored high (salary rise), middle (no change) or low (salary decrease). The manager must simply decide which to assign to who, even if all the team have done well and nobody merits a poor score - see previous post

Enlightenment
The most important casualty of an exam-fevered education is the joy of discovery - which is ironically the most powerful incentive to study. Students today memorise that the planets orbit the sun, the circumference of the earth is 40,000 km or that the swing of a pendulum is proportional to the square of its length. Today these are given as dry, unremarkable truths, delivered without context of the significance of the discoveries or how they changed the world. Nothing is taught about the curiosity, passion and egos which drove people to discover these truths, the primitive methods used to make the measurements, the wrong theories which were abandoned before the right theory was realised, the personal, religious and political fallout surrounding the discoveries. A student's enlightenment comes from learning how a discovery was made, who believed it, why it was challenged, who ignored it, as much as from the actual conclusion itself. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

Once education is made devoid of enlightenment, reduced to examinable facts which are dull and unmotivating, clearly students will begrudge the best years of their lives being smothered by the inexorable darkness of extreme exam culture. 

1979: Pink Floyd's The Wall; an early warning of darker times ahead

The Bottom Line
Putting educational philosophies and student motivation aside, the bottom line is that the business of education is business, not education.  In South Korea education is a huge opportunity to squeeze everything that parents can afford in exchange for even the most marginal perceived advantage for their children.  Like the market for new smart phones, the market for educational services needs no advertising, no sales pitch, no marketing.  Parents actively seek out each and every conceivable opportunity to upgrade their child's study experience.  

The prize is simple; a place at one of the nation's 3 elite 'SKY' universities; Seoul National Uni., Korea Uni, and Yonsei Uni. These accept the top 2% of students which sometimes leaves the student feeling a little more entitled than his less fortunate peers.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-South-Koreas-education-system-affect-students

Competition for SKY and other high-rated unis used to start in primary school with parents spending on average 20% of household income on private evening crammers (hagwon).  

https://theconversation.com/south-korean-education-ranks-high-but-its-the-kids-who-pay-34430

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10491289/OECD-education-report-Koreas-school-system-a-pressure-cooker-for-children.html

Hagwons routinely teach until 9pm, often later, leaving children so tired that teachers perversely have to allow them to sleep the next day during regular school class.

Today the battle ground has shifted to kindergarten, specifically English language kindergartens which are perceived to be the latest way to nudge your child ahead.  On average places cost an astonishing US$ 900 per month but demand is so high that there are already more than 250 English language kindergartens in Seoul - the most expensive of which cost US$ 2,000 per month.

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20180724000470#cb


Ultimately money secures academic excellence with which to further leverage social standing.  To highjack Netflix's flawless adaptation of Richard Morgan's 2002 dystopian vision of our near future;

"Those with eternal wealth have 

eternal power over those who don't."

The Impersonal Touch

Some things are glaringly obvious but this still does not prevent them being overlooked entirely. For example; consider the argument between Darwin, Weissman and Lamarck in the late 1800s. Lamarck proposed that animals adapted to their environment during their lifetimes (eg: giraffes grew longer necks to reach higher branches) and passed on these adaptations to their offspring. Weissman disagreed vehemently and set about proving this by snipping the tails off 20 successive generations of lab mice to show that no tailless mice would produce any tailless offspring. Upon learning of this 'extreme proof', one sage observer noted that those of the Jewish persuasion had been discretely snipping bits off their men for millennia but had still failed to produce a single male who was born without the offending item; therefore why put 20 generations of mice through such unnecessary grief ? This was glaringly obvious but overlooked entirely - with no apologies to Weissman's poor mice. 

Weissman: - not a good day for mice, or Lamarck

John Betjeman's 'Inexpensive Progress' lamented the inexorable power of retailers as they erased the individual character of our main streets with the same impersonal, bleak facades found in every other anonymised town;

"Let no provincial High Street 

Which might be your or my street 

Look as it used to do, 

But let the chain stores place here 

Miles of black glass facia 

And traffic thunder through"

Half a century later we have come to expect a full suite of chain stores in any town centre where we stop for our retail therapy. Starbucks, KFC and Haagen Daz make no attempt to hide their fixes of modern junk food, even in the former opium dens of Shanghai, for example. 

Not a good blend: Starbucks subtly standing out in the crowd in the Old City of Shanghai

KFC: the crowning addition to 600 years of history and culture, Old City of Shanghai 

South Korea is no exception with every hub of every suburb offering the same predictable names in supermarkets, sportswear, clothing, beauty products, restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, fast food, etc, etc. The notable difference in Korea is the tendency for near-identical outlets to cluster right next to each other, often literally door-to-door. Most foreigners will raise an eyebrow of improbability when spotting their first collection of Starbucks, Ediya Coffee, Coffee Bronzz shops all in a row. 

Seoul: coffee shops all in a row

This will be quickly followed by a dropped jaw of incredulity upon spotting four beauty retailers door-to-door such as Innisfree, Etude House, MissHa & Nature Republic. There are too many examples to mention and even the banks can be found in similar clusters.


Initial thinking might suggest that a new beauty shop would be most successful if located as far away as possible from other beauty shops, thereby securing a 'captive audience' who have few other options in the area. By this reasoning, opening a new beauty shop next to established beauty shops would likely split the available customers to the point where all shops become unprofitable. However, the success of these clusters shows that once the first shop confirms demand in an area, then additional similar shops draw more customers by widening the choice. It is simply the time-honoured concept of the ancient gold souks applied to retailing in general; glaringly obvious - unless you missed it.


Food and drink emporia have the added bonus that Koreans are meticulously punctual about eating lunch at noon, often as quickly as possible so they can nap from 12:15 onwards. This creates a daily tidal wave of ravenous customers who will readily revert to a neighbouring eatery if their first preference is full. In this way many restaurants survive as overflows to a popular 'main attraction'. Oddly, and perhaps more obscurely, the same clustering is even seen amongst high street banks.

Since the introduction of ATMs and online banking most countries have seen a steady decline in the number of high street branches, however in Korea you can still find at least 5 of the nation's 10 principal domestic banks on every second city block. Stepping inside the larger branches is like walking into a business class lounge at the airport. With the obvious exception of the doorman, the staff are all young, female, wearing identical short, tight uniforms, expertly primped, meticulously rendered with skin-whitening masks and feigning the proscribed amount of allure. The first time you see this you can't help anticipating Robert Palmer stepping out from behind a pillar for an impromptu re-shoot of his iconic 'Addicted To Love'.

Korean banking; verging towards the Palmeresque

https://youtu.be/XcATvu5f9vE

In busy periods there can be 20 such female staff, each sitting upright and attentive behind a desk without bullet-proof glass, emergency shutters, microphones or speakers. It is undeniably plush and civilised. Just take the weight off your feet, recline in a deep, leather sofa and scan the news headlines until your number appears. Only when called to your allotted desk, do you start to notice the first subtle glitches in the matrix of ultra-high-tech, 24/7, banking-at-the-speed-of-light which has been constructed around you.

Immerse yourself in the Korean banking matrix

If you make the mistake of presenting your passbook (yup, that A6 sized, stiff-covered post-war relic) to the teller, she will insert it into the printer to add every single transaction since your last visit. If this was 3 months ago, that's anything up to 2 or 3 passbooks to fill; each page lovingly opened and smoothed by manicured, moisturised hands before the book is tenderly reinserted into the printer again and again and again. You start to understand why the staff look so vibrant; they need to hold your attention so you do not lapse into a coma before the printing is finished ! For (female) customers who do not wish to be willfully or woefully mesmerised by near-identical clones as part of their favourite banking fantasy it may be worth noting that Citibank at least allows its staff the personal freedom to dress, coif and use cosmetics as they wish.

Citibank Korea - professional service without Palmer-ette mannequins

When it comes to the banking service you require, there are always at least 5 forms to be completed; your form requesting their service, their form offering you their service, your acceptance of the service they offer, your indemnifying them for any consequence of providing their service, your agreement to them sharing your data about your use of their service and so on. Applications for cheque or credit cards typically run to 15 pieces of countersigned paper, ostensibly justified by the security necessary for the issue of such cards. However once in your possession, a father can give the cards to his early-teen daughter who can use them in the shops all day, entirely unchallenged, irrespective of what she buys, or the fact that she is the wrong sex to be the card holder and obviously not old enough to legally accountable for a line of credit. Once again the explanation is glaringly obvious; bank card security is totally ignored by every retailer so the banks protect themselves by placing all risk with the cardholder. "Simples, innit ?"


Transferring money out of Korea is obsessively controlled; even if you have accounts at several banks, only one bank is allowed to transfer your money internationally. The default transfer limit is US$ 50k per year unless you can show documents certified by your employer, registered by the tax dept and Apostled by God (sorry) to prove your salary is greater than this. Regardless of the income your paperwork can substantiate, once the sum of remittances abroad, foreign cash withdrawals and overseas purchases exceed US$50K, your bank cards are automatically deactivated (without warning) for any further foreign transactions. This leaves international travellers suddenly unable to settle their hotel bill or even worse, making them blush much more than anticipated when it's time to pay for their 'Happy Ending Intimate Massage'. Calls to the bank are totally futile; some pert, polite, Palmer-esque subroutine constructed by the banking matrix advises you to open a new bank account in the country you are marooned in, then to make an international remittance from Korea into that account. They dispense this advice with a straight voice in the full knowledge that the preconditions for opening an account in any country, include formally establishing residency, because this is also required in Korea. The glaringly obvious answer is not to travel anywhere with cards from a Korean bank - you never know how they will sabotage your trip while you are away.


With such tiresome inefficiencies built into every operation, one wonders how so many banks have survived and how so many branches remain open into the 21st century. Firstly; although all banks offer an online service, these require pre-installation of a whole suite of unique security programs before each logon. Added to this, much security software is still based on obsolete Active X protocols while many sites are incompatible with newer versions of Windows, Internet Explorer or alternative browsers. Nine times in 10 you can still walk across to your local branch, queue and be served by a Palmerette faster than submitting yourself to this online masochism for a couple of hours in the privacy of your own home.


http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20170710000897&ntn=0


Secondly, joint accounts are not allowed in Korea, not even for married couples. Each person has an individual tax identity and therefore bank accounts in their own name only. Thirdly, married men are often obliged to hand over day-to-day control of their accounts to their wives after marriage as a sign of fidelity, so naturally they quietly open additional accounts on the sly for 'incidental expenses'. The wife is happy to have visibility of her hubby's salary paid into the account she controls but remains oblivious to his business expenses which his employer reimburses into his clandestine account. These two shenanigans probably explain why each family opens more accounts than truly needed. However the main contributing factor to the enduring presence of banks on the high street is surely the vast amount of personal banking generated by the housing rental system.


https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2014/02/15/lumping-it

https://qz.com/183412/koreas-crazy-system-for-renting-apartments-is-driving-the-country-deeper-into-debt/


Korea's 'Jeonse' or 'Key Money' system for renting property is said to be unique in the world. Instead of paying any rent, the tenant gives the owner key money, typically a whopping 50% - 80% of the market value of the property, for a rental period of 2 years. Considering that a one-bedroom apartment in or around Gangnam now sells for ~ US$ 1m, key money of the order of US$ 800k is quite feasible. The owner invests the key money, keeps the profits, then returns the key money to the tenant intact at the end of 2 years without any share of the profit. In former times, when risk-free investments gave relatively healthy returns and when property prices rose steadily, key money worked well. For property owners the key money was effectively a large, interest-free loan to invest and reap a handsome reward. However in the last decade, as returns on safe investments reduced and property market values became more volatile, owners struggle to make decent returns on the key money and sometimes become unable to repay it in full. For these reasons the key money system is gradually giving way to much lower deposits, supplemented by some amount of monthly rent.


Of course most tenants do not hold 80% of the market value of even an average property, so they borrow all or part of this at a modest 2% - 4% interest. In this way the rental system ensures a steady stream of custom for the banks. The banks also have a role in securing key money held by the owner until it is redeemed at the end of the rental. Defaulting owners may forfeit the property to the tenant but this may not cover the key money if property values drop significantly. The system has been likened to taking a short on the property value 2 years ahead. Foreigners write reams on the oddities of the key money system however, quite apart from the foibles of the concept itself, it undoubtedly keeps the banks busy moving huge amounts of money between the pockets of their millions of customers. No doubt this pays for all the plush leather sofas and attentive Palmerettes in branches on every other block.


And finally; let's not forget the most subtle beauty of the rental system; not only does the key money concept keep the banks busy, it has the added benefit of minimising the financial relationship between the tenant and the owner. Although a rental agreement exists between the two parties, the financial relationships, obligations and recourse of each party are primarily with their banks, not with each other, which helps to keep everything as impersonal as possible: just the way we like it !