ambition

The way my school works, the level of a student's English ability is divvied up by color. The lowest level is Red, the highest is Gold. Currently there is one Gold level at the school.

The kids in this Gold class are 11 or 12 years old. They speak English quite well, and so class time tends to meander as topics are brought up by the text that we read and discussions branch off from there. The other day the discussion veered toward their ambitions for their future.

Now, speaking personally, ever since I was, say, 12 or 13 and I realized I wasn't going to make it to the NBA, I haven't had any particular ambition for one profession or another. That's not to say I have zero goals or pursuits, but as I wrote last year, I didn't come to Korea in the first place because of some drive I felt to educate in the intricate ways of the English language. It was just a knee-jerk reaction to learning that I was qualified to do so (as knee-jerk as a 3 month process can be, at least).

These Gold kids, however, are quite different, and I think they serve as a microcosm of the culture of education in South Korea. One kid said he wanted to be a robotics engineer. 12 year old me wouldn't have known what the hell a robotics engineer was. Hell, I'm 26 and I don't really know what it entails. Another kid said she wanted to be a dentist. Another a dentist and a diplomat. Not one of them wanted to be a baseball player or a pop star. Contrast that with American culture where every 6 months another season of American Idol pops up with hordes of delusional Americans vying to find a path to transient glory, while millions more watch from home and are sucked into thinking "Hey, that could be me!" Granted, one kid did say that he wanted to be a ghost, but hey, they can't all be winners.

Part of me loved these kids' responses. Sure, they are optimistically ambitious in the sense that being a diplomat or robotics engineer is by no means ordinary, or easy to accomplish, but not foolish or wholly unrealistic. However, these responses seem more suited for an enterprising college freshman, not an adolescent. And that's what's kind of tragic about being a kid in the South Korean education system. It's an entirely pragmatic and hard-boiled approach to life, with no room for outrageous aspirations, which as unrealistic as they may be, are part of the innocence and charisma of being a kid.

I don't mean to paint these kids in a strictly assiduous way. They still possess the goofiness and awkwardness that comes with youth. They don't lead utterly joyless lives, but I wonder (fear) what their perspectives will be when they are college freshmen.