By Jason Lim
Although I left Korea when I was in the fourth grade, I went to one of the best elementary schools in Korea at the time, Kyungbok Elementary School.
Admittedly, it was a school for children of the privileged, with chauffeured cars dropping off and picking up children in front of the school gates every day. I recall that we even had a decent zoo on our campus, with gaggles of children screaming in delight as a peacock flashed its ostentatious tail daily in the afternoon.
I am mentioning this because my Kyungbok schooling points to two facts that intersect in today's Korean society. One, I don't recall seeing a single handicapped child at Kyungbok, at least not one that studied with the rest of us ``normal'' kids. I am sure that even privileged families have handicapped children, but I certainly didn't see them in my elementary school. Two, many of my ``normal'' classmates have gone on to become leaders in Korean society in many fields, including politics and construction.
This means that dealing with handicapped children was never a part of us normal kids' field of experience since we never had to interact with them. So, when one of the ``normal'' kids became the head of his father's construction firm, he never thought of building an office or apartment building that would allow handicapped people to live or function as fully as possible within the space. It just wasn't part of his everyday consciousness of how he thought about building design.
Same thing with my politician friend. Speaking up for the rights of the handicapped to fully participate in Korean society wasn't really in his frame of reference. If you had handicapped family members or relatives, it was too bad, but it was your problem, not the government's. This doesn't mean that he was a bad guy. He was just unaware and, therefore, unconcerned.
Then people began to become more conscious of the handicapped living among us, mostly due to the tireless efforts of unsung heroes and pioneers who brought the issue to the forefront until the politicians couldn't ignore it anymore. So they passed a law changing the building code so that any building with certain functions and capacity had to be accessible to the handicapped. They even gave the handicapped parking spaces right next to the building entrance. They went further. The handicapped could now even get on the subways by themselves. What generosity! What a bunch of enlightened people Koreans were.
Although my construction friend grumbled over the rising cost and decreasing global competitiveness of Korean construction firms because of the unreasonable consideration for the handicapped, he nevertheless complied and kindly allowed his compliance to soothe his conscience.
But the problem was that the handicapped wanted more. They actually wanted to be able to go to the bathrooms in the buildings that they were kindly being allowed into. They wanted to be able to press the buttons on the elevators. In short, they wanted to act and live ― gasp! ― like normal people in the very spaces that normal people so generously had allowed them to enter, with great pain and expense, in the first place. How dare they? How can they be so ungrateful?
But what the normal people didn't realize was that the handicapped didn't want ``special'' access or entrances made for them after the building was built. They wanted to be a part of the process of designing the building in the first place. They wanted to be included. They didn't want to be excluded throughout the process and have special considerations be made for them at the end, along with the heavy pressure to be grateful. They wanted to be a part of the process from the start. This is the essence of inclusion.
This is a crucial issue because it will determine whether Korea is able to harness and take advantage of the enormous talents of all the people in Korea. Mind you, I said all the people in Korea, not just all Koreans.
And I don't mean just mere representation, either. Having different colored faces on the table doesn't mean inclusion. Inclusion is a process, not a result. It's a process of having everyone ― with different talents, perspectives, experiences, insights, and skills ― participate in the development of design, plan, and decisions. Only through inclusion will people become committed and motivated to achieve the goals that they helped shape.
As we often see in life, what got you here won't get you there. Which means that what got Korea here won't get Korea there unless Korean leadership is wise enough to realize that Korea is already a nation with great diversity, and courageous enough to include everyone in Korea in the decision-making process. For a country that was labeled the ``Hermit Kingdom'' less than 150 years ago and still retains some of the knee-jerk xenophobia and often irrational, jingoistic pride over the purity of its ethnic homogeneity, inclusion will not be easy. But it is crucial to its future well-being.
This thing called inclusion might even mean having native-speaking English teachers actually take the lead in overhauling the English education system in Korea. Imagine that: English teachers designing an English education system. Weird.
Jason Lim was the 2007-2008 fellow at Harvard Korea Institute. He can be reached at Jason.lim@post.harvard.edu.