
The All-Work, No-Play Culture of South Korean Education - Futurebot
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/04/15/393939759/the-all-work-no-play-culture-of-south-korean-education
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rwallace
The more I hear about what life is like in South Korea, the more I wonder
whether the actual difference in quality of life for the average person
between North and South is as great as we are led to believe.

~~~
EliRivers
Having been there, the quality of life in South Korea is orders of magnitude
better than in the North.

~~~
rwallace
You've seen how the locals live in both countries? If so, can you go into
details on what exactly the South has that the North doesn't? (Aside from not
having to worry about having enough to eat, as the other comment observes,
which is indeed a big win.) What's the suicide rate in the North compared to
the South?

~~~
EliRivers
Off the top of my head, things in the South that I did not see in the North.

The food. You said don't mention it. I'm mentioning it. Because it's not just
about food on the plate. The whole system in the North for food is a fucking
disaster. I saw people trying to grow food in the most ridiculous, unsuitable
plots of land in the city (generally when I would pass a window which faced an
inner courtyard or some such). The city is, in theory, for the elites, who are
first in the queue for food, and they're growing whatever they can. As we
drove between towns, we would pass people on foot who were clearly
agricultural labourers. They'd been walking for miles and would continue to
walk for miles, arriving wherever they were going already tired (and they
wouldn't get to where they were going onthe road; they'd walked across fields
to get to the road, and were following it for a while, and then would break
off again - looked like an informal network of paths, and sometimes just
walking across fields, and I think sometimes sleeping out in the fields
because going home is pointless). There's no means of moving the people who
are needed to grow the food to where the food needs to grow. I saw three-
people "ploughing" teams. You take a shovel, and as far as I can tell, you tie
some rope to it, near the head. One person jams it into the ground as hard and
deep as he can, and then the other two pull up on the ropes, helping him lift
it to turn the earth. Take a step forwards, repeat. The occasional ox-type
creature I saw (and I do mean occasional) looked like a prized ploughing
beast. Huge swathes of the "military" are engaged in farm labour. The DPRK
military is big, but it's as much just national service as being a fighting
force.

So when people say food, they really fucking mean it. North Korea is not great
farmland, and the farming there is in dire need of mechanisation, and the
distribution system is how you imagine. So yes, the food.

Other things the South has that the North does not:

Solid fuel (so the ability to stay warm, and the ability to cook, and the
ability to heat water for all the useful things you can do with hot water, and
also the ability to move faster than on foot with more you can hold in your
hands because some of the vehicles run on burning wood; I mean, sweet jesus,
just think of everything that's off the table for a society if you don't have
the reliable means to move people, goods and equipment further than you can
carry something on foot). As one travels between towns, one starts seeing
trees again. At first just way off in the distance on top of mountains and
hills, and then coming closer, and when they start retreating again, you know
you're getting close to some kind of settlement. At some point in the last
twenty years, it looks like people were in dire need of solid fuel and
deforested at scale. There are enormous numbers of sapling surrounded by
little circles of white stones as they try to grow trees again.

Electricity. Cities have it, but it's not very reliable and it's seriously
conserved. I went to a restaurant, and when we got off the bus, it was black.
Really black. All lights off. In the distance was their copy of the Arc de
Triomphe, which had some lights on. This was typical. We were led through
darkness, through dark doors and along a dark corridor, to the restaurant.
Outside the cities, even where I knew there were villages (or at least,
collections of dwellings) it seemed to be pretty much just black at night.

Healthcare. The DPRK has doctors, but it does not have supplies, and it does
not have equipment. You could be the best doctor in the world but without
medicines and equipment, you can't really do much.

Movement. Not just to/from the rest of the world, but internally. As best I
could tell, and from what I could find out by asking, there's no movement of
people from town to town without good reason. So if people are needed
somewhere, maybe someone will eventually notice and do something about it, and
maybe they won't. What industry there is can choke to death for want of
workers, while people do makework "jobs" assigned to them elsewhere.

Height. Related to food. People are shorter than in the south. Sounds
flippant, but it's a sign also of the generally lower level of health.

Shops. I asked about them, and I'm not sure how much of an answer I got, but
food is allocated and handed out by your designated food source (in the city,
probably in the building you live in). Clothing similarly. On special days,
you might be given some money, which you will then use to buy some kind of
sweet from the street stalls that are brought out on that special day. I had
access to shops that I'm pretty sure the locals didn't, and I paid in Euros.
Not that there was really anything to buy. It was as much just to see how it
worked. Which was old Soviet style. One person to show me the item I was
interested in and give me a ticket, one person to fetch the item, one person
to take my money. Three people assigned to a single part-time job, but if the
alternative is living outside the city, I can't see them complaining.

Opportunity. Yeah yeah, it's the cliche of capitalism, you can work hard and
improve your lot. The odds are stacked against you if you start off without
rich parents, but it is possible, and if your goal isn't so much to become a
billionaire as to just learn some things, get a steady job, and build a nicer
life for yourself and people you care about, you can do that in South Korea.
In the DPRK, you can't. Don't like your job? Hope you're one of the elite or
you've got a powerful relative who can move you, because you won't be just
quitting. Your accommodation is part of the package deal anyway, so I don't
know where you think you're going to travel to in search of a better life.
Check the help wanted adverts? I think not. You've got an assigned work group,
and that's how it is. This life you have now? This is as good as it gets. I
say this; it's not entirely true. The DPRK has been forced in recent years to
accept some smidges of market economies; there are some authorised markets,
there are some situation to which the authorities turn a blind eye. There is
some small trading (especially across the border with China). But compared to
the opportunity in the South, it's tiny tiny and it's not everywhere.

The suicide rate? Who knows. These guys says it's higher in the north,
[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/04/north-korea-
sui...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/04/north-korea-suicide-rate-
among-worst-world-who-report) , but other people say it's really low, but then
some other people say it basically doesn't get reported.

So anyway, back to this:

 _The more I hear about what life is like in South Korea, the more I wonder
whether the actual difference in quality of life for the average person
between North and South is as great as we are led to believe._

The quality of life difference is fucking enormous. Really, really huge. The
DPRK is genuinely grotesque, and in so many ways horrible.

~~~
rwallace
Fair enough! Good reminder that no matter how much things suck, they really
can always get worse.

