This post isn't going to win me any friends among the people who don't like criticism of Korea and who also don't bother to read my posts thoroughly, but that's never stopped me before.
I've been a longtime critic of the Korean Teachers' Union, which uses racist, jingoist ideology to advance a clearly political agenda rather than "teach" or foster any real discussion. I have zero respect for this organization, which was until the early 1990's illegal, because it misuses the power of the teacher, it abuses the trust given to the educator.
Whatever one thought about the accident that killed the two middle school girls in 2002, a reasonable person can't condone having elementary school kids play games such as throwing darts at President Bush (hey, I don't like him, either), leading choruses of "Fucking U.S.A." in class, or making sweeping, hateful generalizations about not even the US military, but about Americans in general.
Similarly, no matter how hot tension may get with Japan, it sickens me to see art exhibitions with drawings made by little kids depicting the bloody, machine gun deaths of "the Japanese," the main island "sinking into the sea," which was the #1 sentiment in my classroom after the jointly-hosted 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup was announced in 1994, other myriad manifestations of hateful propaganda I've witnessed.
Yes, in Korea, it's common to hear the Japanese referred to with glib and coarse generalizations, such as "their warlike nature is in their blood" or people even holding the ridiculous idea that Japan is laying in wait to attack Japan again.
What is more ironic is when a Japanese film crew actually goes to Korea, gets permission to observe and talk to kids in a classroom (in an obviously contrived and controlled environment, no less), and even talks to Ministry of Education people – and basically shows just how much ignorance is being officially taught to children.
Without even debating about whether Japan committed war crimes, who owns Tokdo, or who should say what to comfort women, one should be able to see that praying for the demise and death of an entire people is not...umm...healthy.
Just because you were wronged in the past doesn't give you the right to just be plain stoopid, as well as irresponsible as true educators and the shapers of young minds.
For in the process of indoctrinating young minds to hate – which is what the Teachers' Union is doing and the Ministry of Education tacitly allowing – you go against the spirit of true democratic or critical thinking, while crippling innocent hearts in their capacity for empathy.
You can't limit the effects of teaching close-minded hatred to "just" hating the Japanese. It's a learned template that will be applied in other places as well. Just as I, a black person, would be as wrong as any card-carrying member of the KKK were I to teach my children that "white people are evil," so is it wrong to teach blind, unexamined hatred to young children, for any reason.
And one wonders, if Korean youth are taught that it's OK to think in terms of base stereotypes and hateful, simplistic images of entire peoples – while viewing one's own society as complex, full of myriad and sometimes conflicting interests, and populated by people, as opposed to the cardboard characters in one's head – whether there isn't a link to why I hear Koreans refer to Chinese people as "dirty" or "uncivilized" on a nearly daily basis.
Or black people as "scary."
No amount of history can justify tainting the hearts of youth with the mental architecture of hatred.
And it is double ironic that a news piece done by a Japanese film crew, out of perhaps even dubious political motives, can point out the ignorance of such ways of "teaching" so clearly.
Teaching hatred and hard-heartedness does nothing than cede one's claim to the moral high ground; you reduce yourself to the level of the the people whom you criticize.
Ironically, it was the Japanese who invented the present manifestation of the militarized, readily-mobilized school as an Althusserian institution of ideological indoctrination, while Pak Chung Hee worked to strengthen it to better advance the aims of an authoritarian government.
Now, it's great to see the radical leftist Teachers' Union using that ready-made tool to mold new minds in the name of "correct" thinking and "correct" history. Somewhere along the line, when you're so busy teaching hatred, you forget to teach to forgive, to take the moral high ground, to have a true confidence in the veracity of one's position.
And slowly but surely, one forgets just who began the cycle of hatred; but the only thing that remains clear is that it won't end. In my historical experience, the oppressed doesn't have the social, political, or moral privilege to be as hateful as one's former oppressors. Someone's got to take the high road, or the entire debate remains debased.
As in Orwell's Animal Farm, the pigs have certainly learned to walk erect and bark orders, just like their former masters.
