I loved our reading last week on the banking theory of education. South Korea has the ultimate CHASE bank monopoly in their form of education. Corporal punishment was still widely practiced during my tenure at two different high schools in Daejeon. Teachers literally beat their students with 2×4 wooden boards that had holes drilled into them. One time I was lecturing in the middle of the day–regular, routine day, just like any other. A male student began talking to his neighbor and sorta tickling him in his sides. My co-teacher pulled this student out of my class without saying anything. Ten minutes later he and the student came back in the classroom and took their seats. My co-teacher’s face was bright red and he was breathing heavily. The student’s face was also bright red, not breathing heavily, and he was crying. I also noticed that the teacher had broken the 2×4 that he had used to beat this students backside. His name was Park Tae Won and he held these broken boards in his hands with a perfectly complacent expression and listened to me finish my lecture. Later, after class was over, he came up to me and explained that he had beaten the student “like a man” because he had been messing around in the previous class too.
The whole experience was so surreal. I didn’t say anything in disagreement–I had to work with him on a daily basis and this wasn’t my country or culture–but my immediate reaction was to think, “how is beating a student’s backside with a board” manly? Then I thought that if he had really wanted to “beat the student like a man” he should have given the student a board so that they were both equally armed.
It wasn’t just men that got beat there either. Girls got beaten, though not with 2×4’s, not on their backsides, and I don’t recall ever seeing a male teacher beating a female student. It was strictly female teachers beating female students. The teachers used cylindrical rods about the size of a forearm in length and a finger in girth. The girls would kneel on top of a chair with their feet tilted up toward the ceiling, and the teachers would beat the bottoms of their feet. Or, if not their feet, the teachers would have the girls hold their hands out, palms up, and beat the interior of their hands.
Students were beaten for all manner of misbehavior, but the most common was for tardiness. Every day I went to school, I’d walk past a line of students in the parking lot waiting to go to the gymnasium where they would be beaten and then dismissed to first period class. It was always the same students, always the same infractions. Other reasons beating the students included: not having the right uniform, talking, not doing homework, being disrespectful to a teacher, and getting into fights with other students.
The most unfair reason for getting a beating was not having the proper uniform. Both of the high schools I taught at were in low-income areas of a mid-size city. Many had single parent homes and did not have much money for food, let alone the proper uniform. So they got beat. As I passed these students in the mornings, eager to get there a bit early and down a cup of coffee before first period, I’d think to myself, “What sense does it make to keep beating a student when they will never have the money to buy the proper uniform?”
Tradition and conformity are strong in South Korea, sometimes for the good, sometimes not.