Thought Development More Important Than Learning English

By Rick Ruffin

Whether Koreans ever learn English is not really all that important. What's important is that they learn how to think.

Japan spent billions, perhaps trillions, of yen on English education over the last 40 years, and look where it got them. Few people in Japan can speak English.

Yet Japan is, by most indications, a developed nation. That's because the Japanese have learned how to ask questions, something Koreans are still struggling to do.

While studying at Yonsei University, I met an American linguist who had been living in Japan. He told me that when the European imperial powers first came to Korea, the Koreans told them simply to ``go back home," no questions asked.

When the same imperial powers had come to Japan years before the Japanese had asked them ``teach us how to make those shiny guns." Then they told them to go back home.

Why are Koreans so void of curiosity? Look no further than the Korean proverb, ``Bin surega yoranhada," or ``Empty vessels make a lot of noise." This proverb teaches that he or she who makes a lot of noise, perhaps by asking too many questions, has few thoughts inside his or her head.

In the Western world we have the same proverb. We also have the proverb, ``Curiosity killed the cat" and we often say, ``Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing."

For Socrates, certainly, too much knowledge was a dangerous thing. He literally paid with his life for harboring the thought, ``An unexamined life is not worth living."

Asking questions can be risky business, and Koreans, generally speaking, are not risk-takers. That's because the government of Korea has always tried to eliminate risk while guaranteeing security to its people. While good in one way, this robs the citizens of the ability of solving problems on their own.

Another reason for this apparent lack of curiosity is Confucianism, which teaches that asking a lot of questions is rude, especially to those of higher social standing, whether their rank is based on age, gender, or economic or family background. Thus, one could argue that Confucianism is incompatible with life in the modern world.

Japan also has a rigid social hierarchy that hinders free flow of information. Let's examine what Japan did to make asking questions easier without compromising their cultural integrity.

About five years ago, many Japanese corporations decided to drop formality. For instance, semiconductor maker Elpida Memory decided that titles would no longer be used.

Employees and employers alike would be addressed by family name with the suffix ``san'' appended. Instead of Honorable Suzuki, Ph.D., Founder and President for Life of Our Esteemed Corporation, the boss simply became Suzukisan. The guy who cleaned the bathroom, given he had the same surname, would also be Suzukisan.

This made it much easier for the average worker to approach the boss and fire off a couple of questions. As one Elpida employee said, ``It's easier to talk now."

A similar experiment could be conducted in Korea. We would no longer have to go around bowing excessively and muttering hoejangnim this and gyosunim that. We could, in essence, get rid of this ``nim" excess and just say hoejang (chairman) or gyosu (professor).

Everyone could be called by ones' family name with the suffix ``saem" appended, which would make communication a lot easier.

Because of this inherent inability to ask questions, Koreans have gotten themselves into a mess.

Many teachers coming to teach English in Korea are forced to undergo a criminal background check. This inconvenience could have been avoided in the first place had employers asked prospective employees a few simple yet hard, questions.

Questions like ```Can you spell the word missionary?" ``Are you an alcoholic?" ``Do you give a damn about your job, or are you here just to drink beer and chase women?" These are the questions that should have been, but were never, asked.

But instead, Koreans' collective inability to ask hard questions has led to an English teaching workforce full of a disproportionate number of slackers and alcoholics with degrees purchased on the Internet, or no degrees at all, thus the need for the criminal background check.

Likewise, the Lee Myung-bak administration is paralyzed by an inability to deal with the economic problems besieging Korea because they have learned only how to react, not how to think.

There is not a gram of innovation in the entire administration. They are running around frantically trying to ``fire up the growth engines" when too much growth is what created this problem in the first place.

What Koreans need is to keep asking questions. In fact, ask more questions than ever before. Ask questions of everyone, everywhere, and for every reason imaginable. Question everything, especially authority.

Koreans must learn to ask more questions, even if they seem not worth asking. Remember what great civil rights leader Malcolm X once said: ``the only stupid question is the question that isn't asked."

The author teaches in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, where he encourages his students to ask many questions. He can be reached at rick.ruffin@gmail.com