Let me explain. November 10th is National Exam Day. This is the day my ladies in the senior class have been working their entire lives for. In this exam you have three core subjects: Math, Science, and English. I hope that I influence their score in English for the better. I'm not too sure if the foriegn teachers have an effect either way on the scores. Some truths are too scary too uncover, and I think I'll leave this one in the ground. I like my job.
Anyway, if you are a Korean student you want to make the highest possible grade. That way you get into a SKY (Seoul National University, Korean University, Yonsei University) school. The three top schools. You'll get the good job.
So behind my school is a mountain. I was told a week ago that everyone is going to the mountain to pray for our students and would I like to join them? Of course!
It's a steep treacherous mountain. I was expecting a little walk, but man, I am out of shape.
I get to the top of the mountain and there's most of the staff and teachers (most of them got there before me; good thing one of my teachers is diabetic otherwise I would have been one of the last to reach the summit). They clap for me because I made it.
There's a nice little stone monument at the top of the mountain. In front of the monument is a pig's head. The heads of the various departments take their turns bowing, putting money in the pig's mouth, and pouring a glass of makoli (rice wine) as a libation. then we take a box of prayers that the students had written and burn them. Of course, nobody believes there is really a mountain god (South Korea is about 1/3 Christian, 1/3 Buhhdist, and 1/3 unaffiliated); it's a tradition. Similar to how in Louisiana we often name our Krewes after Greek or Roman gods. Few people believe in the old gods, but it's still fun and meaningful to entreat them on festive occasions. Traditions are important.
Without tradition life would be as shaky as a pansouri performance on a pagoda!
And besides, my girls have it tough. Really tough. Korea has the highest suicide rate of the first-world countries. Education and the drive to suceed is really something fierce.It would be nice if the appraoch to education was changed a little bit so we could have fewer student suicides.
Looking at this in context, though, it's pretty inevitable that things would turn out like this. During the 1950s South Korea was one of world's poorest nations. It had come out of Japan's colonization, and as we know, colonial powers tend to gear the colonized economy not toward the benefit of the colonized but instead for the colonizer. It had just come out of WWII, which wasn't too nice to Korea, and to top it off one of the most devasting wars of the 21st century was raged across the entire peninsula.
Fast forward to today and South Korea has the world's 12th largest economy. The quality of life here is easily comparable to any western nation. A lot of this is because of their education system. But the thing is, you don't go from 40 to 12 in forty years without casualities.
So besides leading the developed world in suicide rates, South Korea also leads the developed world in alcoholism. Surprisingly (or made not given the alcoholism) South Korea also has a higher rate than the U.S. of aggravated assaults.
South Korea's traditional emphasis on education (from the Confucian tradition) and its survivalist mentality (from the Napalm-the-Communists-Until-the-Country-is-a-Desert tradition) have added to a sometimes stifling Confucian Corporatism.
One would hope that South Korea, having made it, would slim back a little on the rigor for the sake of its mental health.
And look, I'm not knocking South Korea for the sake of knocking South Korea. I don't have a lot of patience for expat complaining sessions. If you were to ask me if I would rather be poor in the ROK or in Louisiana I would choose the ROK. They have an outstandingly better education system here and universal healthcare. But perhaps it has gotten excessive.
Too lazy to continue, next post I'm gonna talk about what I think the U.S. education system could learn from South Korea. I'll also talk about how Confucianism is really interesting and complain about the fact that philosophy departments don't seem to teach it. Also, East Asians may be genetically more likely to be sad.
More brilliance! fantastic. Love the last point about genetics and sadness for Asians - might qualify as scientific racism though... but phenotypically and stereotypically (or something like this) we/they do have a propensity for certain emotions including shame and sadness - what about a propensity for low self-esteem? Could that ever be linked to genetics? But really are you thinking of race as genetic? If so the science probably won't bear you out.
ReplyDeleteJoe,
ReplyDeleteI don't mean race to mean some kind of static, unchanging metaphysical entity. On the contrary, genetic diversity is generally very good for any species, so from a purely evolutionary view it is a good strategy to have partners with very disimilar genetics.
What I do mean by race, though, is a certain distribution of genes within a given populations. These populations often get classified based on phenotype and an often incorrect folk anthropology. So I'm not meaning the kind of racialist classification that Boas was so upset about; rather, I am appealling to the simple fact that certain environments favor certain genetic distributions over otheres and the genetic results of those enviroments we tend to call race or ethinicity.
I don't see why just on the face of it, then, why certain populations can't have genetic predispotions towards one thing or another. Why would evolution only be a neck-down process?
Take a hypothetical situation where a certain enviornment favors a population that is stoic (let's think of a cold climate agricultural society where planning ahead for harvest, and as a consequance controlling consumption, and as a result being stoic can mean the difference between life and death). Over time those with a stoic disposition reproduce more because they are more successful at gathering resources than the less methodical members of the population. As a result, whatever genetic combination that gave that person a stoic disposition in this certain environment will get passed on.
All that said, environment and culture play a huge role. What's more, morality dictates that we treat people as individuals in their own right. A genetic propensity to one behavior over another does not mean a guarantee that one will act in such and such a matter, nor does phenotype necessitate a certain kind of person.
So to answer the question: yes, I think it possible that what we call East Asians may well have a genetic likelihood towards sadness. I just say possible not because of individual experience (I find my collegues jovial) but because i don't see exactly why evolution would forbid that. It's an empirical, not analytic, question.
However, if it has more to do with environment (and it is hard to seperate evolutionary and environmental factors because they can effect one another) then I'm cool with that too.