By Mark Peterson
I’ve been thinking about the Korean phrase “Chal salgiwihayeo” which can be basically translated as "in order to live well." I used to hear that phrase back when I first came to Korea as an aspirational statement, a hope, a goal. And indeed, Koreans that I used to know, sacrificed, saved, worked and studied for the coming days in the hopes they could "live well."
America in those days was described as a nation where people “lived well.” And that was the goal for most Koreans, I suppose. But now Korea is prosperous and has achieved many of the goals of living well, but maybe there is a downside to the goal of living well.
Living well for many people today, I fear, has come to mean living beyond "well,” living luxuriously and prosperously. And the downside that I fear the most is that the desire to live well has led Korea down a path of raw materialism that has cut against other, more precious values. I’m thinking of children and the state of affairs in Korea that has led to the lowest birthrate in the world.
Korea is proud of its many world-class achievements, including having the highest literacy rate in the world, the highest high school graduation rate in the world and the highest college graduation rate in the world, and of course, to witness the growth of the economy to a point where Korea is now equal to Japan in personal income levels. Those are all wonderful accomplishments, and Korea is to be congratulated. But the world’s lowest birthrate is not something to be proud of.
The low birthrate will lead to other problems, such as taking care of the “silvering” population. Korea once had great manifestations of solidarity and of working together for a common goal, like building the economy. But now there is a certain sense of selfishness that’s worse than the selfishness of Americans, which Koreans used to love to point to. It used to be that Americans were synonymous with individualism and concomitant selfishness, but now the shoe is on the other foot. It is Korean selfishness that is the strongest element that has driven Korea to be the world’s leader in low birthrate status.
If we can all agree that this is a problem, and as I have chatted with Koreans on this most recent trip to Korea, I have found that there is not a consensus — some people think the low birthrate is a good thing, but most recognize that it is not. The government is trying to do its part to encourage people to marry and have families, but the same government has been so successful at “brainwashing” the populace into thinking that children are a problem and that couples should only have one or two, is now trying to tell people to have three or four, and it’s not working. The incentives for having children are not outweighing the brainwashing of the population to have only one or two.
What to do?
I don’t begin to have the answer. But I see some of the problems are tied to the costs of educating and raising children. When I surveyed friends and strangers on this last trip to Korea, inevitably and always the reason given for not having three or four children was the educational costs, the highest cost of raising children. And there are things that can be done about that. I am convinced that a couple can raise children without the high cost of tutoring. I am convinced that in the same way, Korean citizens were brainwashed into thinking that they should only have one or two children, they are brainwashed into thinking they need to spend 40 percent of their income on tutoring.
I stand as evidence that one need not spend hours and hours of tutoring after school. I never did it, and I have the best education a person could have — a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
I am not an advocate for homeschooling, the movement that is very strong in many places in America. Homeschooling in the hands of poorly educated parents makes poorly educated children. But the homeschoolers like to argue that they have seen some of their children admitted to the best universities in the world. Homeschooling is not the key factor. The key factor is the parent’s interest in the child’s education and the child’s I.Q., or native ability.
We don’t need expensive tutoring to get children into the best schools. Parental love and concern and active involvement in the child’s education makes more of a difference than all the tutoring in the world. The secret to successfully raising a family of four or six children is not how much money you can spend on tutoring. The secret is how much the parents love and cherish their children and teach and tutor them themselves at home. IMHO — in my humble opinion.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
To live well
23
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19.11.2023
By Mark Peterson I’ve been thinking about the Korean phrase “Chal salgiwihayeo” which can be basically translated as "in order to live well." I used to hear that phrase back when I first came to Korea as an aspirational statement, a hope, a goal. And indeed, Koreans that I used to know, sacrificed, saved, worked and studied for the coming days in the hopes they could "live well."
America in those days was described as a nation where people “lived well.” And that was the goal for most Koreans, I suppose. But now Korea is prosperous and has achieved many of the goals of living well, but maybe there is a downside to the goal of living well.
Living well for many people today, I fear, has come to mean living beyond "well,” living luxuriously and prosperously. And the downside that I fear the most is that the desire to live well has led Korea down a path of raw materialism that has cut against other, more precious values. I’m thinking of children and the state of affairs in Korea that has led to the lowest birthrate in the world.
Korea is proud of its many world-class achievements, including having the highest literacy rate in the world, the highest high school........
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