Jung Hanna

EPISODE 2. EXPERIENCE & ABILITIES

Living in Italy with kids has given me a lot to reflect on about East Asian education. While I approach this topic with skepticism, I also recognize the historical and cultural logic behind its development.
Education has long been the primary path to social success in East Asia. For those with means, it represents an all-consuming investment. Traditionally, education was not about understanding or discovery, but about memorizing ancestral wisdom and attaining personal enlightenment through reflection. This wisdom typically emphasized propriety, philosophy, and human relationships—values that benefited society as a whole.
This system was likely sustained by geographical conditions that prevented large-scale wars of conquest between regional powers for nearly 2,000 years (with exceptions like Japan’s Kamakura period, where the rise of the samurai class shifted governance—though the core socio-political values remained unchanged).
The learning process was slow, lifelong, and designed to select a minority elite from the masses aspiring to public office and social influence.Through years of rigorous study, individuals internalized the idea that they were part of a larger historical and national framework. Those who succeeded through this process were expected to serve society, and their wisdom was respected. Of course, this was the idealized vision of education—reality often involved corruption and political maneuvering.
With the rise of Western colonial influence, scientific discoveries and philosophies from Europe spread rapidly across the world. For East Asians, mastering this new knowledge became essential to avoid falling behind. The problem, however, was that while knowledge was transmitted, the historical events, societal transformations, and philosophical shifts that shaped those discoveries were not. East Asia received the conclusions but not the lived experience that produced them.
As before, East Asian education adapted by prioritizing memorization. Western knowledge was absorbed rapidly, but without the historical context behind it, education became an exercise in rote learning. Success was measured by the ability to recall information rather than by understanding, reflection, or engagement with society. Today, education has been reduced to a race for grades, detached from the process of learning itself.
I can’t help but wonder: Has East Asia’s education system—built on absorbing knowledge without expe-riencing its origins—shaped a society driven by material success, rigid hierarchies, and a fixation on results over meaning? If the goal of traditional education was enlightenment, but modern education has become a factory for efficient workers, what was lost along the way?
The fervor for education in East Asia—driven by embracing Western perspectives, celebrating their discoveries, and striving to catch up—has yielded visible results. After all, a country ravaged by civil war, a defeated war criminal nation and a former colony became mathematicians, scientists, and key figures in the IT industry in less than a century. Yet, whether this constitutes actual achievement remains a matter of debate.
As for the forgotten educational philosophies of East Asia and their profound depth, I’ll explore them in another episode, with more profound and more prolonged reflection.

• Reference

Joungsue Kim, Ria Kwon, Hyunok Yun, Ga-Young Lim, Kyung-Sook Woo, Inah Kim, The association between long working hours, shift work, and suicidal ideation: A systematic review and meta-analyses, Scand J Work Environ Health, Oct, 2024.

Ana Singh, The “Scourge of South Korea: Stress and Suicide in Korean Society”. Berkeley Political Review, October 31, 2017.