“So I was just listening to the most recent episode of the Seoul Podcast and they had some interesting thoughts about education in Korea and about universities more specifically. There’s one thing that I’d like to mention here.

One person talked about how too many people in Korea go to university. At home, in North America there were plenty of people that I finished high school with that didn’t go to university. This was really okay…they found jobs, did a more practical thing at a community college or learned a trade or just traveled for a while or whatever.

In Korea however, this is not okay. EVERYONE MUST go to university, even if they are not academically inclined at all in any shape or form. There are way too many unis here that even the very worst of students who probably struggled to pass their high school courses can get in somewhere. You can even go to university for 4 years to study flower arrangement or archery. Aspiring professional golfers and movie stars and singers waste their time at uni instead of just trying to make it big in whatever they aspire to. I’m sure you could find a 4 year program in basking weaving if hard-pressed.

Anyway…the result is, I have to teach dumb-asses (for lack of a more appropriate description). While I am the queen of exaggeration this is no lie for about 5-10 % of my students depending on the major. These people have no business being anywhere near an academic setting and their time would perhaps be much better spent doing just about anything else. But the pressure in Confucian Korea to conform to a certain little mold of what a “successful life” looks like is just too great to resist. And in many ways I feel sad for a lot of my students. They hate studying, I hate teaching them but they don’t appear to really have any other options. I think it’s time for change in Korea.”