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| 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. |
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| 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.
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.
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.
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| 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 ? |
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 ?
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| 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.
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.
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.
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| 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
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 ?
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| 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
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.
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.
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| 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."
