South Koreans focused on college, career

To the editor:
    It is a quiet Sunday here in Sun Chang. Thanks to its relationship with the West there is a strong Christian presence in the community. Within a mile of my home I can see several towers with crosses. The Catholic Church is built on a stone outcropping that allows the church itself to rise above its small portion of the community with a collection of statuary and symbols of the Holy See. So there is faith in some form here.     The students finished their college entrance exams on Thursday. The total testing took some nine hours of time out of the day. This is a nation obsessed with tests. The college entrance exams caused the airports to restrict takeoffs and landings of jets during the oral listening part of the test. We might view this as silly.
    To understand part of the issue is to understand the inherent fear that families have that their son or daughter will not make the connections at university that will lead to a better position in the community. So much of what a family considers its position is the relationship connections built on family connections. We are lucky in the U.S. by being able to move from one location to another with little problem. Throw your stuff in the U-haul and off you go.
    It is that idea of re-inventing yourself, moving to a new location and beginning again that frightens many of my students. They are stunned when I tell them what I did before I became a teacher. The idea that I have had a variety of jobs in many different places and had some small measure of success is at odds with the pre-determined role that students have here. I asked my adolescent students why they were not playing basketball and soccer after school — their reply was that adolescents no longer are able to play. They must show that they can study and succeed in school work. Sad really.
    They do play games. The computers and computer rooms are packed between classes and during study time. But the idea that you can have some fun doing a different type of learning seems to be lost on them.
    Now the national exam is over. It will take a month to get the scores back. In the meantime, students continue to send out their applications and hope that the test scores back up what their grades demonstrate. The fixation with exams continues and business humors the demands of parents to lessen the amount of noise during the exam period, however irrational that noisome interference might be. The media is filled with stories of people praying for good grades to a multitude of gods.
    In the end, faith in one’s own abilities will win out. It is not the one test, one moment, or one act that gives us the measure of a person. Indeed this is a presumption that is discouraged by the very words used to lead the faithful. Instead, you need to be like the farmer, nurturing a future from a ground that seems barren of life. Hard work, dedication and kindness will lead you a long way. That is the ultimate test.