To save our unfortunate children

Nelson Mandela said, “Nothing reveals the soul of a society more accurately than the way it treats its children.”
What is the 'soul of our society'?
How does our society treat children?
Do you respect them as human beings and value their lives?
What are you doing for their happiness?
In short, are we raising our children to be dignified human beings, mature citizens, and individualistic free beings?

Eight out of ten of our citizens believe the government should step in to alleviate the suffering of competitive education.
Now, the nation, no, all of us, must step up to end competitive education and rescue our abused and trampled children from this extreme suffering.
I fear for the future of our society, which will be created by unfortunate children, children hurt by competition, oppressed children, and thoughtless children.
The misfortune of children is the reserved misfortune of society.
If we save our children, they will save the Republic of Korea.

---From "Introductory Remarks"

From competition to solidarity, from ability to dignity, from knowledge to reason

Korean education is an education that creates a few winners and many losers.
It is a structure where the winner takes everything and the loser loses everything.
So it's no wonder that classrooms become battlefields.
In these battlefields, the winners internalize arrogance, and the losers internalize inferiority.
This is the structure of 'arrogance and contempt' and forms the basis of social psychology.
The problems facing Korean society today are fundamentally rooted in our educational reality, which is no different from a battlefield.
---From "1-1 'Setting Wrong Educational Goals, Academic Class Society'"

The reality that universities have become slaves to power rather than champions of critique is clearly revealed when we look at university campuses.
No matter what social tragedy occurs, no matter what political corruption is exposed, no matter what international disaster occurs, not a single poster is posted in Korean universities.
Korean university campuses have become completely depoliticized.
This is a stark contrast to the situation in Germany.

Whenever I go to Germany, I usually stay at a German university.
A visit to Menza, the university cafeteria, will immediately reveal what German university students are interested in.
Just the pamphlets that students handed out while we were eating were a handful.
There is no issue they do not address, including ecological climate change, deepening social inequality, and discrimination between countries within the European Union.
But the flyers that now flood our college campuses are full of nothing but job information.

---From "1-4 'University is Dead'"

We are not very sensitive to the concepts of fairness and justice.
Fairness and justice are concepts of quite different dimensions.
In fact, they are not concepts with the same value.
Fairness is a rule, justice is a principle.
Fairness is common sense, justice is philosophy.
Fairness is a means, justice is an end.
Above all, fairness is the logic of the market, and justice is the logic of society.

In a way, fairness is the logic of managing competition more fiercely.
It is a declaration to create a society where competition becomes more rational, more heated, more thorough, and more suffocating, and a resolution to drive the losers of competition further to their deaths.
It is questionable whether fair competition and fair trade can be the means to reform this most unequal country.
It is likely to become a means of further deepening and legitimizing inequality.
---From "2-3 'Fairness is the trap of justice'"

In German universities, medical schools are just as popular as ours in the science field.
Almost all medical, dental, veterinary, and pharmacy schools have NC departments.
There is no choice but to limit the number of students as they flock to the school.
In such cases, there has been much debate in Germany as well, trying to find a "just" way to respect students' freedom of choice as much as possible within the limits that universities can accept.

Initially, most states preferred lotteries.
I thought that the democratic method of 'lottery' was better than the method of making children compete in the name of 'ability'.
Naturally, there were many people who expressed dissatisfaction with the lottery method.
I really want to go to medical school and become a doctor, but I keep getting rejected in the lottery.
In the case of the NC department, they requested that the Abitur grades be reflected.
So several states have taken this feedback and started incorporating it into their Abitur scores.
But that too was done within certain limits.

---From "3-2 'A School Without Competition and Ranking'"

Sex education is essentially self-education.
It is a confrontation with the 'me within me'.
In other words, the core of sex education is to help people see for themselves the divide between their 'real biological self' and their 'morally idealized self.'

In Germany, we are taught not to feel guilty about sex.
Since the goal of German sex education is to cultivate democratic citizens with a strong ego, I believe that instilling a sense of guilt that weakens the ego is fascist education that runs counter to democratic citizenship education.
The first principle of sex education in Germany is that "no ethical judgments should be made about sex."
Sex has nothing to do with ethics, and the development of sexual desire at a certain age is a kind of blessing.
It is a natural biological phenomenon and not a question of good and evil.
However, while we teach that we should not feel 'guilty' about performance, we also emphasize that we should have a strong 'sense of responsibility' about performance.
Because sex is considered a field related to life and human rights, very strong punishment is imposed on sex-related crimes such as sexual harassment and sexual violence.

---From "3-4 'Sex Education_ Building a Strong and Responsible Self'"

Who should be the driving force behind the educational revolution? History teaches us.
The history of mankind has always been a history of liberation, and all liberation has been self-liberation.
In other words, the suffering became the subject of the revolution.
Black liberation was led by black people, and women's liberation was led by women.
The typist cannot replace it.
Therefore, the question of who is the subject of educational liberation can be reduced to the question, “Who suffers the most in Korean education?”
Who could that be?

First and foremost, the party that suffers the most is the student.
And the students and their parents, who form a 'community of suffering', also share in the suffering.
Teachers who share life with students in collapsed classrooms are also important members of the 'community of suffering.'
In short, students, parents, and teachers are all victims of the suffering inflicted by Korean education.
I believe they should be key players in the educational revolution.

---From "4-2 'Who suffers the most in Korean education?'"

Teachers are a profession with enormous political and social influence in any country.
In Germany, teachers make up roughly 13 to 15 percent of the federal parliament in Berlin.
After lawyers, teachers are the second-largest profession in producing legislators. The OECD average is around 10 percent, and in the Finnish parliament, teachers make up around 20 percent, making them the occupation with the largest number of legislators.
Generally speaking, the democratic maturity of a society and the political participation of its teachers are usually directly proportional.
The more mature the democracy and the happier the welfare state, the higher the political participation of teachers.

---From "4-3 'In Search of the Lost Authority of Teachers'"

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, college students have demanded tuition refunds.
The argument was that students should have their tuition refunded because they were unable to receive a proper university education due to the coronavirus pandemic.
I welcome the college students' raising of the issue, but I believe the logic they put forward is fundamentally flawed.


What students should be demanding is not 'refund tuition fees', but 'eliminate tuition fees'.
First of all, I think students should study university history more seriously.
We must ask ourselves what a university is and what history Korean universities have had, and seek answers.

What is the logic behind demanding a tuition refund? It's fundamentally based on a "market-oriented view of the university."
In other words, the logic is that I paid money to purchase a university education in the higher education market, and now that there is a 'defect' in that educational product, I should demand compensation.
While this demand itself is valid, the view of the university that underpins this claim is flawed.
This is because it is an argument that starts from the view of universities that see university education as a product to be purchased in the market.
The fact that college students are making these claims is proof that they are completely captured by the ideology of capitalism and the free market economy.

---From "4-4 'To Restore Children's Right to Education'"