By Cho Jae-hyon
Why are students so crazy about winter jackets that carry the “North Face” logo? The ridiculous fad has been sweeping middle and high schools for years for no particular reason.
In order to get their hands on one of these expensive padded down jackets, some teenagers do part-time jobs and others go to the extent of committing crimes.
For some parents, buying a nice parka for their child could be nothing out of the ordinary. But if these items carry price tags of more than 700,000 won (about $600), it’s obviously a big deal, especially for those with a low income.
That’s why they call it “Mopsseul Face,” with “mopsseul,” phonetically similar to the Korean word for “north” meaning “bad.”
They are also called “backbone breakers” as parents must labor to the point of breaking their backs to buy one for their kids.
Why do they want to wear the American outdoor brand so badly, which was originally designed for professional mountaineers who scale the peaks of the Himalayas?
A joke succinctly sums up the phenomenon: “It’s because public education is headed up the mountains.“
The expression “headed up the mountains” is an old saying Koreans use to describe situations in which things are going wrong. “Education is headed up the mountains” means it’s in shambles.
So, as the saying goes, students go to school geared up in the climbing jackets in a meaningless pursuit of an education that apparently has no purpose and is without direction.
It’s been said for decades that the nation’s public education system is in a mess. Every government has attempted to fix it but to no avail. In fact, they have exacerbated the situation.
The biggest problem in the Korean public education system is that it changes too much, too often.
But one thing that never changes is the fact that it is always focused on a handful of top students, leaving the rest alienated.
Homeroom teachers are usually too busy taking care of academically-outstanding pupils to pay attention to mediocre students.
As they fail to win acknowledgement academically, these “sub-par” students, feeling like outcasts or losers, try to find solace somewhere else.
They also need recognition. They somehow want to excel among their peers. This intrinsic desire underlies the craze for the North Face jackets.
As they are all but invisible in academic records, one of the only ways that they can fit in is to be clad in one of these jackets that everyone is sporting.
They seek to elevate their status among their peers whichever way they can. The more expensive their North Face, the higher their status, so the argument seems.
Bullying and violence at schools, which is now in an overheated media spotlight, are not much different.
Victims of bullying are called “wangtta” in Korean. “Wang” is a prefix meaning “big,” and “tta” is short for “bullying.”
One really good way of becoming one would probably be hanging out without a North Face on their backs.
For weeks, not a day has passed without reports of wangtta cases following the suicide of a middle school student, a victim of bullying by his classmates in Daegu. Newspapers and TV programs are pouring out in-depth reports on school violence, chiding the authorities and teachers for their failure to institute and carry out effective countermeasures.
In response, the government and education offices are scrambling to unleash a set of measures. But few believe any of the steps would help root out the problems of wangtta.
Authorities are looking at the problems based on assumptions made through filters of their own personal experiences and belief system. The assumptions are often a far cry from the bleak reality students are facing.
Bullying is a lot more serious here than in other countries. Both bullies and the bullied are victims of an education system that has gone wayward, way up the mountains.
The ongoing buzz about school violence will fizzle out soon as the whole nation will be engulfed in news about the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.
Of course, which party and which candidate will win will be important in determining the course of education over the next four or five years.
The winning camp will conduct major surgery on the educational system as usual. But the dilemma is that there is no magical solution. No matter how hard they try to tackle the problems affecting the school system, it won’t be easy to address the root cause. Everybody has different diagnoses of the disease.
In the meantime, students will remain vulnerable to violence and bullying with no help in sight. They have no one to turn to when they are bullied. Their parents and their homeroom teachers are not of much help.
In the Confucianism-steeped Korean society, students are taught to refrain from talking back or speaking up even when they are unfairly treated by those with authority. But this makes the situation worse. They need to learn to say “no” when they are ill-treated.
In this regard, the government must listen carefully to teachers. Many teachers say their opinions have not been properly reflected in policies.
Above all, the authorities must put priority on paying greater attention to alienated students, many of whom are well on their way up the treacherous mountains tucked away in their North Face jackets.