Left Flank

I can't agree more:

I think the very fact that English education is an issue in the election shows just how ludicrous Korea's fixation on learning English has become.

The craze to learn English in the ROK has little to do with fluency in a globalized world, and more to do with South Koreans competing against each other in a rigid market and social system.

A few years of naively plodding work in the South Korean TESOL field is followed by the desperate need for a second career. This was supposed to be the year I smoothly transitioned from my university's F-2 extra government bonus status to a new career in think tanks and non-profits. OK, it's been a dull, uneventful thud on the depressing way down on the job search these past months, but listening to these political plots to reform the TESOL business adds extra urgency to the instinct to flee.

I do recall in high school, that I had a choice between four foreign languages.

But, this is not the point: both the frustrated employee and the presidential candidates avoid facing how miserable the job market is. It's not just that the public educational system needs dire reform, but where would a South Korean work? In the handful of large corporations? There's not enough of an employment sector to support a better educated population. And, more importantly, both the education and corporate sector are not designed to support full employment. Crush the dumb and resourceless, and promote the well-connected, the unionized, and the best test-takers!

When I read what the UNDP's presidential candidate as to say about the ROK-US alliance, I can find one bit of good news in Chung Dong-young's «pro-US» rhetoric. Comrade Chung might be a flip-flopper, but then it's election time in the ROK. But, to what purpose is he flopping?

Finding the center in South Korean politics requires more international relations than opinion polls. The bulls-eye is located somewhere between Beijing, Pyongyang, Tokyo, and Washington. If the progressives in the old Uri Party managed to shift the line on the DPRK leftward, towards aid and reconciliation, the conservatives have kept one foot in the ROK-US alliance. Progressives pay lip service, minus whatever Washington does outside the Korean peninsula, because the US has to sign a peace treaty with Pyongyang. It's galling, but the DPRK is not about to give Seoul diplomatic recognition by sitting down at Panmunjom alone with South Koreans. South Korean progressives need America to do what they can't; conservatives need Washington to defray the costs of what the progressives sow.

When I look at Comrade Chung, I just see a desperate fish.