Revisionist History Ep.4 - Carlos doesn't remember

Carlos, who is the main character in the podcast episode “Carlos doesn’t remember” represents poor but highly intelligent students in advanced countries. In the entire lecture, Malcolm Gladwell points out a few things to help the students like Carlos by exemplifying the man named Eric. This episode described the educational inequality (or inequality of chance to have education) in U.S.A. very well. However, this unbalanced situation in not limited on the boundary of U.S.A. As I mentioned in the above, students like Carlos keep suffering and waste their superficial ability due to a harsh educational system in South Korea.

At the beginning of an episode, Gladwell temporarily mentions the policy in university for the poor. The system wasn’t actually effective to save students like Carlos, but the importance of having those systems was attested. However, that basic system for the poor but smart students doesn’t work well in modern South Korea. In fact, only a few universities offer the policy to help the poor but intelligent students to enter their school. Even the condition of the system is worse than the system in U.S.A.

Let’s look at the simple example. Seoul National University is the highest school in the world university ranking among the universities in South Korea. However, according to the 2017 administration policy in SNU, only 160 students can be the one who enter SNU by applying the policy for poor. Unfortunately, entire freshmen in the year 2017 was over 2500. It means that students like Carlos are the minority, even this amount refers to 0.6% of all freshmen students. Because of the limitation in the educational system of South Korea, students like Carlos must compete each other to become beneficiaries of that policy.

The next point is about the overall educational system in South Korea. According to the episode, 80% of the students like Carlos in U.S.A lose their academic potential at the age of teenagers. Despite that horrible rate, over 35000 students are selected as a potential one after becoming teenagers. Throughout this analysis, figuring out students in early ages, providing suitable education to students and leading them in the right direction is more important than other matters. Surprisingly, these two subjects aren’t existence in modern Korean educational system. Today, Korea’s educational system composed with the elementary, middle and high school. Most of the children get the same quality of education and they grew up similarly. During the period of elementary, students like Carlos should be treated differently. However, the education system in Korea strongly focused on the unification of all students. The problems are the lack of private institutions and wrong common beliefs of Korea: “Special isn’t special, normal is the best thing in your life.” Uniqueness and differentiation is regarded as useless and social maladaptive.

Unbalanced opportunity and limited freedom to be a special makes South Korea weaker than past few decades. To be a real advanced country and to enhance the aspect of civic awareness, South Korea must fix the overall modern education system.