Korean Job Discussion Forums

[TheUrbanMyth]

[kiwiboy_nz_99]

[tomato]

Hello, Gladiator!

And thank you for sharing that article with us!
I think Mr. Kim it telling us the truth. Because of his message, everything is fitting together which never fit together before. It answers many questions which have been puzzling me for years.

I don't mean to put words in Mr. Kim's mouth, but his discussion of Korean cooperativism makes many Korean beliefs apparent to me.

Let me summarize those beliefs:

If it can't be supplied by an institution, it's not valuable.

I once asked a Korean doctor, "What sort of exercise do you think I should do?"

He said, "We don't have exercise facilities here at the clinic."

I said, "What sort of exercise do you think I should do by myself?"

I repeated the question a few more times, but he still didn't understand.

There is no need for teacher accountability or school accountability.

Every once in a while, someone writes to this forum, saying something like "Help! I'm new here and the students in my school aren't learning poodle-de-doo! Someday the parents will wake up and realize this! They'll get together and close the school down! What am I going to do?"

I write back, saying, "Relax. When I came here, I was afraid of the same thing, but it never happened. If parents looked for results, we would have schools closing down left and right."

Why this blind faith in English schools? Because English schools have classes! Classes are groups and groups are good!

There is no point in practicing English outside the classroom.

It has always amazed me that this country abounds with English students of all ages, all levels of education, and all socioeconomic levels, yet we never hear these students breathe a word of English to each other.

It has also amazed me that Korean parents pour so much money into English schools but don't lift a finger to help their children learn English. My contention has always been that these parents should speak English to their children as much as possible. If they merely turned all their �̸� ��'s into "Come here"'s, that would help considerably.

Shall we suggest, then, that English students and English school mommies practice English? Oh, no! The place for learning is in the classroom!

There is no point in speaking English spontaneously.

English students are assembled for one purpose only, and that is to pay homage and reverence to the author of the textbook. Anything which the author puts down in the textbook is sacred. To add, subtract, or alter those words is blasphemy.

Never say, "Good afternoon, class" in English unless it's in the textbook.
Never say, "Turn to page 37" in English unless it's in the textbook.
Never say, "Johnny, stop pulling Suzie's hair" in English unless it's in the textbook.

Or adding picture books, songs, games, or other ideas in the class? That's worth being excommunicated!

You can't learn unless someone is teaching you.

Why do Koreans speak to us in English all the time?

From the time I arrived in Korea, I have felt insulted by Koreans speaking to me in English. I have taken this as a brazen insult, because such Koreans purportedly considered themselves smarter than me.

I have ranted endlessly interminably about this, and I apologize to forum members who are hearing my story for the umpteenth time.

I have wanted to shout, "Don't you think I'm capable of learning Korean at home without a teacher?"

The Korean would probably say "No. No one is capable of learning anything without a teacher. We aren't necessarily smarter than you are, it's just that we have had classes in English and you haven't had classes in Korean."

Why are there so many �п�'s in relation to bookstores?

On every corner, we see a music studio, English school, or karate academy. And many of these schools are for adults, not just kids. So Koreans must really like to learn.

So why don't we also see a bookstore on every corner? In light of Mr. Kim's article, the answer is simple: You can learn from �п�'s, but you can't learn from books. Books don't have teachers standing over you with a stick.

Why do young people want to go to the PC��'s and spend hours upon hours fighting imaginary aliens when there are hundreds of interesting ways to learn from the Internet?

Again, the answer is simple: You can't learn from the Internet, either. The Internet doesn't have teachers standing over you with a stick.

In addition, here is something which I never noticed until today: In my 4 years in Korea, I have never seen a single advertisement for a correspondence course. Of the many customs which Korea has copied from West, this is one custom which have never copied.

And why should they? You can't learn from a correspondence course either!

All foreigners are alike.

I have tried to tell Koreans that stereotyping foreigners is a sign of prejudice, and prejudice is evil. I never got very far with this, because good and evil are matters of opinion.

The Koreans are probably thinking, "We also say that all Koreans are alike. What's the difference?

In conclusion, here is one question which Mr. Kim probably should have discussed: how did Korea come to put a higher priority on the group than on the individual? Surely all the citizens did not get up one morning and say, "Let's push cooperation and suppress the individual."

This is probably because Korea had a rural past. The United States did too, but not for nearly as long.

There is probably not a country in the world where rural people are not more cooperative and urban people are not more individualistic. You need one attitude to survive in the country, you need the other attitude to survive in the city.

It is no wonder, then, that Korean citizens tend to apply a cooperative attitude in places where an individualist attitude might work better.

[tomato]

This is a postscript to my last post:

At the first English school where I worked, the director taught a class with two students. The director stood before the two students, reading verbatim from a book of English grammar rules written in Korean.
While he gave this boring recital, the students did nothing but follow in the book. There was no discussion, no conversation practice, no testing, no nothing.

When I overheard this class, I thought, "What are these students paying for? I would just buy a copy of the book, study it at home, and earn interest on the money I'm saving."

Now that I understand the blind faith in classroom learning, it is all clear.

[captain kirk]

Take the Australian aborigines. At a stone age level of development for millenia. Why?
I can't recall the name of the book I just finished reading, 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', I think. It won the Pulitzer prize and is written by an anthropologist who did a lot of fieldwork in New Guinea. It's very 'readable'. The book answers 'Yali's question', which is the question of Yali, some New Guinean guy, who asked the author one day why it is that some cultures are more advanced than others. Is it because some races are more 'with it' than others? Back in Canada I lived beside a Phd who did work in micropaleantology (sp?). His specialty was an extinct, fossil micro-organism which, in his electronmicroscope photos of it, which looks like a little ball with spikes on it. He didn't like Canada's native peoples much and figured the plains indians had a pitiful level of development (compared to the Europeans who pushed into the West of North America) simply because the natives were, basically, mentally and therefore culturally defecient. I disagreed. I majored in anthropology and thought the plains indians didn't have this and that, and no settled villages, but they did have religion, culture, consciousness and existence of a high degree. Basically 'people with souls/soul', like the aborigines.
Well the author of 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', throughout the course of the book, makes his point that all people are alike in potential, but environmental conditions determine to what degree they can 'take off' and advance. Some regions have wild crops which aren't suitable for domestication, proper nutrition, and a settled down enough existence that provides leisure to develop inventions and progress.
The only domesticable plant in Australia is the Macademia nut.
While what he calls 'the fertile crescent', where proper agriculture began (along the Euphrates river, etc.) had an abundance of domesticable large headed grains.
North and South America had corn, but it took too long to domesticate a bigger cob. That and beans and yams made a nutritional combination/base for cultures in Ohio (the mound builders) but Europeans arrived with their diseases and conquest before North American culture could independently evolve, as it would have given time.
Australian aborigines DID have the bow and arrow invention passed on to them a long time ago from overseas traders, but they discarded it. Maybe because Australia is open land and the throwing sticks and atlatls they used were sufficient. Also, says the author, Australia has, on the whole, the most infertile land of the inhabited continents, barring certain regions.
It's a common, rather racist argument that the modern stone age cultures were simply lazy. Instead, he says, the wild crops of these regions didn't have the characteristics to be readily domesticated into high yield foods. So they had to make do foraging, which was all right just the same.