Dreaming of what is possible
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By Lyman McLallen
Try not to be a person of success but rather try to be one of value.
An idea attributed to Albert Einstein
The day-to-day grind of classes and the countless hours spent at the library must seem like a never-ending marathon to university students, for the drudgery of keeping up with their studies never stops. That’s not to say they don’t have their fun, but they take their work at school seriously.
Still, life isn’t as severe for students in Korea today as it was for their grandparents when they were young back in the 1950’s and early 60’s, at least not in comfort and convenience. Korea was still war-torn and poor then, and the country exported only low-tech, labor-intensive products such as textiles and inexpensive toys.
Looking at faded black-and-white photographs of university students in Korea from those years, you can tell that many of them must have stayed hungry, even if they didn’t starve. Back then, they were lucky if they had one decent pair of shoes and a change of clothes, a pen, a pencil, and a notebook. Many of them weren’t sure what they were going to do once they graduated, but there was plenty of work waiting for all of them.
These days, university students in Korea have more than a few pairs of good shoes, closets and drawers filled with nice clothes, plenty to eat, and smart phones that can do just about anything. Also, Korea has a strong economy because its corporations manufacture and export quality products that fetch high prices the world over. Like their grandparents, though, today’s students aren’t sure what they will do once they graduate. So before they even finish their last semester, they’re looking for jobs.
But it can’t be just any job, it’s got to be with one of the big corporations. Ask any of them why they applied to university in the first place and most will say they have dreams of getting one of those choice corporation jobs so they can make their parents happy and live well for the rest of their lives.
The trouble is there are only a few of those jobs to go around, so most of the students striving for them won’t get them. But that doesn’t mean that these students are failures. There’s plenty of valuable work for them to do. They’ll just have to change their dreams to something that’s possible.
We human beings have been changing the world to suit ourselves from the start, and we’re changing it faster now than we ever have. With our advanced science and refined technology, young people in school today will change the world more in the next 20 years than the rest of us have changed it in the last 1,000.
Working with students every day, you find out quickly that they know a lot more than students knew 20, 30, and 40 years ago. And why not? They understand the world in ways that just weren’t possible before now. They’ve grown up with the Internet and the devices to play with it since they were children. And they know how to find information that the best scholars in the world a generation ago couldn’t find if they had all of the great libraries in one place.
Which puts the students in the best position human beings have ever been in to see what the world can become. Not only can they dream about that world, they’ll be able to make it happen.
Lyman McLallen is a professor in the English College of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. His email address is lymanmclallen@gmail.com.