By Michael Breen

In a mass event whose outcome will set each individual's life direction, over half a million students Thursday descended on hundreds of locations around the country for the annual all-day College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT).

The day was met with nervous anticipation. What if the alarm doesn't go off? Or if I catch malaria? What if North Korea invades? Will the tanks let me through? What if I studied all the wrong things?

At times of such impending terror, which adults experience going to the dentist or public speaking, you find yourself thinking, ``By this time tomorrow, it will be over.'' You try to visualize tomorrow, but the images won't come.

This exam hell is by no means unique. Students all over the world sit exams. But the experience is especially intense for Koreans.

The CSAT, as everyone knows, is important because it is the main gateway to university. Students torture themselves for years preparing for it. Not only is the entire education system geared towards the exam, but so are family finances. Parents spend as much again as the government spends (of their taxes) on extracurricular tuition to give their children an advantage. A popular option, for the same cost, is for children to go abroad, with their mother, for school.

Korean youngsters, as a result, have no childhood (and their lonely fathers drink too much). You don't see them in the park at night kicking a football around. They learn to want jobs with high status. Boys don't grow up dreaming of playing for Suwon Bluewings or of being train drivers or farmers or anything else that doesn't require a degree. Even actors and pop stars want to go to university so they can say they have a degree. Can you imagine Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney wasting their time at university? (Actually, Jagger dropped out of the London School of Economics).

All this is because in Korea, people do not go to university to get educated in order to qualify for a career. Rather, they go for the same reason that young men go to officer training school ― they'd rather be officers than enlisted men. This military vibe in Korean society comes from the Confucian penchant for ranking, which is seen as necessary to create order and achieve a harmonious society. It underpins the national tendency to label people.

And from this perspective, the CSAT is the work of a genius. If you've ever wondered why kids don't hang around shopping malls or go to school in saggy jeans ― you know, the kind that hang down as if an elephant has laid a turd in them ― and answer back to teachers, like in American movies, it's because of the stress of education in general and this exam in particular.

And this explains why it is so difficult to change the education system. People know the change that is needed. We all know that students need to be taught from elementary school how to develop and articulate their own ideas, not just to learn reams of facts. What no genius has figured yet is how to do this without kids turning into stroppy layabouts in saggy pants getting lippy with their superiors.

As this dilemma suggests, there is a profound aversion in this culture to debate. The clash of ideas is seen as more clash than ideas. Many of the problems in this society can be traced back to this one profound cause. Instead of the exchange of ideas, one finds exchange of symbols of power and he who has the power has his ideas accepted.

The irony here is that when people spend all the time rushing at each other like peacocks for who has more status, there is no real harmony. Similarly, when people have to contain their thoughts in the face of greater power, as in many families for example, you get pretense, dishonesty and frustration. The harmony is a delusion. This is a fractious society in which people are angry and mistrustful and exceedingly rude to one another.

The exquisite delight in society's torturing of its children is that the education foisted on them is third rate. Those who do well in Thursday's exam will get into a poor university. Those who mess up will have to be content with an even poorer one. And whichever way they go will impact how they are perceived and how they perceive of themselves for the rest of their lives.

If you don't believe this harsh judgment, Google ``university rankings'' and see if you can find a Korean institution in the world's top 100.

Perhaps, if all other persuasion fails, it will be the need to get up the rankings that will finally prompt real education reform.

Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants Exclusive Partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.