A few days ago, Korea Teachers' Day was held. I sent messages of gratitude to teachers I could reach out to. My homeroom teacher in high school regretted not having a good college year despite the fact that the students were talented. However, I had a very satisfactory senior year in high school, and I informed my teacher that none of my friends lived a crooked year. In reality, yes. Our school, which was a rural school at the time, mostly had young first-time teachers, so it seems that they did not conform to the existing system while fulfilling their educational enthusiasm.
We enjoyed reading and exercising to our heart's content. In those busy high school seniors, I learned at dawn that Simone Bayou had taught philosophy at a French high school. And while reading a book about Harrison Salisbury's journey, I noticed that Deng Xiaoping would grow China. In high school, the most impressive reading was the memoir of Truong Nutang, an official of the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), which was serialized in weekly Joseon. Later, I learned that students from cities had high school days that I couldn't even dream of. And I often visited my high school.
On the one hand, I have compiled a chronicle of how memorized education focused on entrance exams develops or retreats society through some major events in myself and society as an adult. Memorized education focused on entrance exams works during the days of middle-developed countries when the national system was being organized. However, as the country grows and leads other countries and ranks as advanced countries that need creativity, I have learned that memorized education focused on entrance exams is an obstacle to national development. Korea, Singapore, and Japan will all be experiencing this fact.
On the one hand, I also understood that if North Korea wanted to reform, it would have to cultivate bureaucrats who understood the economic system and cultivate scientific and technological personnel. The effect of educational reform could be seen after 20 years if we want to reform deeper education. Therefore, there should be educational reform in the practical areas that can have short-term effects. Artificial intelligence praises the comments in this section.
Education Shapes People: The Shadow of Exam-Oriented Education and the Light of Autonomous Learning
A Dialogue on Education, Society, and North Korea
1. The Social Cost of Elite University Entrance Education
Both Korea and the United States face criticism that education geared toward elite university entrance has contributed little to genuine social progress. From a societal perspective, those who have passed through the elite university-to-professional-career pipeline tend to treat that very system as the foundation of their own legitimacy. To question the system is to question their own existence—and so they become, paradoxically, deeply conservative.
Twelve years of training to 'find the right answer' leads people to believe the world itself has right answers. The existing order begins to look like 'the answer.' By contrast, those raised in autonomous educational environments develop an ingrained habit of questioning—and refuse to accept the existing order as a given.
2. The Paradox of a Rural School: Essential Education Flourishing at the Margins
A rural high school in 1980s Korea offered a remarkably unconventional educational environment. The school paid little attention to university entrance preparation, but was staffed by passionate young teachers in their first posts—and students were free to read widely, play multiple sports (badminton, basketball, volleyball, football, table tennis), and engage with current affairs magazines.
It was no coincidence that none of those classmates later went astray. Reading expands the inner world. Sport regulates the body and emotions. Engagement with current affairs connects the individual to the wider world. A young person with all three in balance already has the capacity to absorb setbacks when they come.
These teachers were passionate in their subjects while remaining untouched by the exam-preparation system—people who were 'outside the system yet true to its essence.' This was the realization of Rousseau's vision of autonomous education: natural stimulation rather than coercion.
The paradox is clear: it was precisely because the school was at the margins that essential education became possible. The closer to the centre—the elite Seoul high schools—the greater the systemic pressure, and the further from the true purpose of education.
3. The Yoon Suk-yeol Crisis: A Failure of Education Made Visible
It is symbolic that a man who had climbed to the very pinnacle of Korea's elite pathway—Seoul National University Law School, prosecutor, Prosecutor General, President—reached for martial law as a political tool. Behind the impressive credentials lay a complete absence of critical thinking.
Knowing nothing beyond law, he could not see how the economy moves, what drives diplomacy, or how public sentiment shifts. To govern people requires insight across geography, economics, and science alike. The Yoon crisis demonstrated what happens when a 'system-manufactured human being'—in Rousseau's terms, the opposite of a natural person—seizes power.
4. Lessons from Global Education Models
Finland and Germany offer contrasting models of excellence. Finland is Rousseauian: competition is eliminated, formal assessment is delayed, and teachers are treated as professionals. Germany takes a different approach, identifying aptitudes early and separating vocational and academic tracks—a system that recognises many different kinds of excellence rather than ranking everyone on a single scale.
France's baccalaureate asks secondary students to write four-hour essays on questions like 'What is freedom?' It trains young people to face questions without predetermined answers—a philosophy diametrically opposed to Korea's university entrance exam.
The American paradox is equally instructive. Despite a chaotic public education system, the United States leads the world in Silicon Valley, basic science, and cultural output—thanks to people who grew up outside or despite the system. America's strength was never its educational institutions; it was a cultural tolerance for deviation and experiment.
The synthesis: reform institutions in the Finnish and German manner; train people to think in the French manner; and cultivate a culture that permits deviation and experimentation in the American manner.
5. North Korea's Education and the Challenge of Reunification
The tragedy of educational reform is that results take twenty to thirty years to materialise. When elites formed by a flawed system gain power, they redesign the educational system in their own image—a self-replicating structure.
In North Korea, for three generations the sole purpose of education has been the reproduction of loyalty to the regime. Decades spent in a society where critical thinking threatens survival mean that even if institutions change, distorted habits of mind remain.
The practical approach is to begin with reforms that do not require ideological transformation. Training economic officials to manage a market economy, and developing technical workers through vocational schools, are changes that align directly with what Kim Jong-un most wants: regime stability and economic survival. China's Deng Xiaoping reforms and Vietnam's Doi Moi have already demonstrated that this pathway is viable.
Economic officials and technical workers form a middle stratum. Once that stratum exists, information naturally flows, contact with the outside world increases, and society acquires the internal momentum to change on its own terms.
6. Conclusion: It Must Be Done, Even If It Takes Twenty Years
Begin reform today, and the effects will appear twenty years hence. But it cannot be left undone.
This is not mere optimism. To act knowing the results will be long delayed is an act of responsibility that reaches across generations. Rousseau wrote Emile in that spirit. The young teachers at that rural school taught with that same spirit.
Good education is a seed. The one who plants it may never see the fruit. But without planting, there will never be any fruit at all.
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