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SKOREA-SOCIAL-EDUCATION-DEMOGRAPHICS,FEATURE
Life lessons for S. Korea’s octogenarian school pupils
SUNCHEON, South Korea, May 31, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – When the tune of “Twinkle
twinkle little star” plays in her South Korean classroom octogenarian pupil
Nam Yang-soon sings along with classmates more than 70 years her junior.
With South Korea’s population ageing rapidly and families migrating from
the countryside to the cities for decades, rural primary schools are facing
falling pupil numbers.
Now some are targeting the opposite end of the age spectrum and recruiting
elderly illiterate grandmothers — who were denied education on gender
grounds during their own childhoods — to stave off the threat of closure and
teach them to read and write.
“I have often felt like others looked down on me because of my
illiteracy,” Nam, who at 84 is the oldest of three grandmothers in second
grade at Woldeung Elementary School, told AFP.
Her favourite subject is mathematics. “It is so much fun adding and
subtracting numbers,” she chuckled, adding: “I want to be in school as long
as my health allows me.”
Korea has been a patriarchal society for centuries, with a long-ingrained
preference for sons over daughters — obstetricians in the South are still
banned from telling parents the sex of a foetus.
Even as late as the 1960s, some South Korean girls did not to go to
school, especially in the countryside.
“My grandfather insisted girls like me had no use for education, said Park
Young-ae, 70, one of Nam’s classmates at the school in Suncheon, in the
southeast corner of the country.
“I always regretted I couldn’t set foot in school as a young girl,” she
said.
Now she is enjoying the “best moments” of her life with four young
classmates, she added, whether its taking spelling tests or singing songs
together.
Eight-year-old fellow pupil Kim Seung-hyun addresses his ageing friends
with the honorific terms that Korean requires for elders, but hopes they will
continue all the way through sixth grade, when primary school finishes in the
South, and on to middle school with him.
“I think I would be sad if they stopped coming to school,” he said.
– Ticking time bomb –
Each morning the women walk between the fields of South Jeolla province, a
rural backwater that is the South’s ricebasket, to the school 320 kilometres
(200 miles) from Seoul.
As the South industrialised in the decades following the Korean War vast
numbers of people moved from the countryside to the growing cities in search
of employment, prosperity, and a piece of the Miracle on the Han, as the
country’s rise to become the world’s 11th-largest economy is known.
The trend continues to this day — the number of people in farming
families fell by nearly 70 percent in the 30 years to 2018, figures from
Statistics Korea show.
At the same time South Korea is facing a demographic crisis with young
people choosing not to reproduce in an ultra-competitive society with a
stagnant job market.
The fertility rate — the number of children a woman will have in her
lifetime — dropped to less than one last year, one of the lowest figures in
the world, down from 4.53 in 1970.
Currently 51 million, the population is projected to fall to 39 million in
2067, when the median age will be 62.
“South Korea is experiencing an ageing process at an unprecedented pace,”
said Cho Sung-ho of the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, adding
it was “struggling to adapt to the declining trend”.
Woldeung Elementary School typifies the phenomenon. At its peak in 1968,
it had 1,200 pupils. Now just 29 children attend.
Last year it faced having to combine its first- and second- year classes
because of the lack of numbers, so offered places to local residents who had
not previously gone to school.
The grandmothers’ much younger teacher Choi Young-sun, 43, says she was
“very nervous” about their presence at first, but they have proved a positive
influence.
“I have observed my students behave in a much more mature and respectful
manner than other children of their age,” she said.
At least three other schools in South Jeolla are known to have recruited
grandmothers, but a provincial official declined to say how many had done so
altogether, or how many grandmothers had enrolled.
“We have withheld the information because we think it is sensitive,” she
said, “especially as we don’t have countermeasures to the falling number of
students in rural areas”.
BSS/AFP/RY/1632 hrs