Students: Do They Have Human Rights?

The answer to the above question is such that one would hope everyone working with kids would say, “Yes.” And to their credit, some teachers, parents, and students agree, as they showed by hosting an event back in July:

Seven chapters of the progressive Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union, the Parents Association for True Education, and the youth human rights group Asunaro will host an event Wednesday to launch the Seoul headquarters for rules on students’ human rights.

Can you imagine who disagreed?

In response, the conservative Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations released a commentary Tuesday saying, “Legislating laws on students’ human rights encourages conflict between teachers and students.”

And the killer is their reasoning for doing so:

“Rules on students’ human rights do not respect schools and see things only from the perspective of universal human rights,” the commentary said. “Too much emphasis on a student’s human rights could infringe on other students’ right to learn and teachers’ right to teach.”

One is tempted to wonder why schools — institutions designed to serve human beings — are supposed to be “respected” more than the human beings they’re designed to serve; one wonders to what degree a sane person can argue that a system that is incompatible with the perspective of universal human rights doesn’t deserve to be maintained.

One of the examples given was what students who feel a little hungry in class might demand the right to go out and eat, and if the teacher says, “Wait till breaktime,” the student might claim his or her human rights were violated.

Which seems inane. A Westerner would look at such a dispute and point out the fact that if the rules were written intelligently, this kind of outcry would be immediately demonstrably silly. Write the rules well, minimize the loopholes for abuse on all sides, and enjoy the increase in quality that ensues. Yes, writing rules well is hard: but it’s much better to have rules that can be repaired than to have none: at least, that’s what makes sense from a Westerner’s perspective.

I say “a Westerner’s perspective” because, obviously, it’s not Westerners who are the primary stakeholders in this dispute. Korea’s Confucian background may have soemthing to do with it: after all, as Simon Leys puts it:

Confucius had a deep distrust of laws: laws invite people to become tricky, and bring out the worst in them. The true cohesion of a society is secured not through legal rules but through ritual observances. (From Ley’s introduction to his translation of The Analects of Confucius, pgxxv.)

If you ask me, though, this explanation is too clever by half. There may be some cultural foundation on which this distrust and fear of rules is seen as normative among right-wingers — but there are left-wingers from the same culture who are calling for a specific set of rules to be established.

So to me, it seems likelier that the reality is simply this: Confucius was unfair to rules: human trickiness comes out whether you have them or not, and the teachers who’re against having rules are just leery about having one form of trickiness — the kind that is used in a rules-poor system — replaced by the need for another kind of trickiness — the sort that we find in a rules-rich system.

If anyone is looking for examples of how a rules-poor system makes for an unlivable modernity: drive a car in Korea. While a majority of people know and follow the rules, a large minority seem to operate as if the rules of the road either don’t exist, are guidelines, or simply don’t apply to them as individuals. (I don’t drive myself, but the rides I get with Western friends and in cabs are, as often as not, quite harrowing.)

In any case, for those who don’t live in Korea, here’s a roundup of links on the kinds of issues that are at stake for Korean schoolkids and their human rights:

  • A moronic editorial that points out how things are soooo much better for schoolkids today than during the dictatorship era, and how it’s the human rights of North Korean schoolkids that are the real concern. Er… so, until the Koreas reunite, South Koreans have no right to criticize the establishment or improve things? How stupid is that?
  • Corporal Punishment is now banned in Gyeonggi-do, the most populous and powerful province in Korea. Which is confusing: everyone says it’s not allowed, but it’s widely practiced just the same. Anyway, it’s being officially replaced by a reward-and-punishment system called Green Mileage. No word on whether Stephen King has taken offense on the copyright pseudo-infringement, though it is telling that this system’s name is so close to the name of a famous prison novel and film.
  • Here’s an article from 2003, published by Human Rights Osaka, about the Korean education system and students’, teachers’, and parents’ rights.
  • Hair is, for some reason, an obsession among Korean school administrators and teachers:
  • In 2008 students at certain schools who had naturally brown or curly hair face discrimination and even were required to carry special ID… because it’s not allowed for students to color or perm their hair.
  • Hair length is a constant issue, as are summary clippings which, quite obviously, are designed not to shorten hair but to humiliate (see the pictures in this article also). It’s worth noting that during the dictatorship era, this kind of summary hair-length checking and clipping was carried out on the street, in order to “prevent cultural contamination” — but Korean society is now thankfully free of such ridiculous dictatorial practices… except, of course, schoolkids. Note that this kind of crap is a newsworthy oddity in the West: in Korea, it’s everyday practice.
  • Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling, who’s done a ton of research and writing on this issue, points out just how much of the worst part of the dictatorship era lives on in South Korean schools today. (You can find more of his writing about issues affecting Youth in Korea — including school issues — here.)
  • I wrote earlier about violence in Korean schools here, as part of my discussion of the film Kick-Ass. There’s a lot of writing about that online, though… feel free to Google around.
  • As part of the same discussion, I mentioned school uniforms, and I personally think it’s quite self-evident how oppressive it is to make people wear them. (After all, anyone who’s shown up at a party to find someone else wearing the same article of clothing as himself or herself will know what this feels like. Anyone who argues it’s different for kids, or when carried out on a mass scale, is, I think, wilfully ignoring that kids have feelings too, or that oppressive structures can be carried out on a wide scale. (Consider the amount of spying on fellow citizens that has been part of most totalitarian regimes, including South Korea’s postwar dictatorships.) But I think it’s more worthwhile to point you at a couple of articles mentioned in the source footnotes to Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness (or see the book’s website), which stand as good evidence that, on a scientific basis, it’s oppressive to make schoolkids wear them…

    (And I’ll add, before someone jumps in an argues that Korean society is different, being “less individualistic” and “more collectivist,” that these articles and other studies in general suggest that human beings are neither fully individualistic nor fully collectivist, but rather balance the two tendencies or needs. We can predict the boundary line for norms being set in different place, but that’s unlikely to do away with the deep-seated need to both fit in and be however different is permissible or lauded in a society. (And my everyday experiences with Koreans in and out of classrooms supports this observation.)

  • Brewer, M.B. (1991). “The social self: On being the same and different at the same time.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 475-482. Basically: Brewer outlines the basics of Optimal Distinctiveness Theory, showing that people socially seek to be both similar enough to others to “fit in” but also distinctive enough to be perceived as an individual with distinctive, worthwhile traits. Basically — we like to fit in, but not too well.
  • Fromkin, Howard L. “Effects of experimentally aroused feelings of undistinctiveness upon valuation of scarce and novel experiences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Volume 16, Issue 3, November 1970, Pages 521-529; and (no link, sorry, the issue has not been added to the journal’s online archive) Fromkin, H.L. “Feelings of Interpersonal Undistinctiveness: An Unpleasant Affective State.” Journal of Experimental Research in Personaluity 6: 178-85 (1972).  Basically, it’s neither pleasant nor good for your experience of the world to be made to feel less unique than one tends to already feel oneself to be.

Anyway, what I meant to point out, at the outset, is not the problems alone, but that there is at least discussion going on. Not all the links in my link list are about negative things: the banning of corporal punishment is a really good thing… in theory. However, I’m not optimistic about how quickly, or effectively, this will root out teacher-student violence: the real remedy is to fix the dysfunctional school system itself — a system that exaggerates the dysfunction already found in the modern, industrial school system more genrrally. (Which is to say, schools everywhere are a mess, not just in Korea… but the Korean model seems to bring out even more of the bad and suppress too much of what good can be scraped together in modern schools.)

By the way, hat tip to Surprises Aplenty!, who got me going on this subject and from whose post on the issue my first link was taken.

3 thoughts on “Students: Do They Have Human Rights?

  1. Wow, you really did a lot of research on this. I have done little research on this, but I can give you some ‘gut’ reactions and popular Korean language press arguments that you may be less aware of.

    As you said, some of the issues revolve around the Confucism / traditional Korean power issues. Some teachers (and professors) nurse low grade anger that they do not have absolute power that they used to. I think the fact that they do not have that power anymore is (for the most part) good thing, since a small (but non-negligeable) proportion of those teachers have been abusing their power, but the feelings are definitely there; and many older people want to return to those days. I feel that this argument is basically BS, but there are other problems as well…

    1) Apparently there’s really very little teachers can do to discipline really unruly students. NO matter how disruptive a student is to the class and school, you cannot expel them, and it’s hard to even kick them out of the class and into the principal’s office. This was done to keep the school from harming the student’s self-esteem. (However, it says nothing about the self-esteem of the kids who are being bullied upon or other kids in the class whose studies are being disrupted).

    2) Many people, including myself, wonder whether the Human Rights Commission of Korea is sane. They made a recommendation last year that elementary schools should not assign daily diaries as homework because it would be an invasion of privacy. (How stupid do the kids have to be, to write private thoughts in a diary that they know they have to hand in as homework?)

    3) One of the rights that is being discussed is the right for children to demonstrate on behalf of the teachers (who may belong to the Teachre’s Union) – there’s a whole bunch of issue about standardized exams related to this, and it will take much too long to get into it – and some parents are worried that the teachers (who see the kids more than the parents, frankly), may misuse their inflence and/or demonstrations in Korea have the tendency to become violent due to fault of people on both/either side of the issue.

    Obviously, what you need is a well-defined set of rules and regulations detailing the rights of both problematic students and the schools so that the rights of both students who “create trouble” and other students who are affected by it. (As far as I know, no country gives non-adult students and children full civil freedoms.) However, the way that Korea is politicized nowadays, no one trusts anyone to make rules that are even semi-permanent.

  2. Confucius had a deep distrust of laws: laws invite people to become tricky, and bring out the worst in them

    Confucian ideologists hate written laws because it forces them to be subject to the same rules responsibilities as everyone else in society.

    Bronze age libertarianism. It needs to be thrown into the trash bin of history.

  3. Junsok,

    I don’t think I did that much research, it’s more a collation of things I’ve read over the years, thought about, and so on. Had I done more research, I’d know more about the Korean-language press stuff you mentioned, and thanks for making me aware of all that.

    As far as I’m concerned, the issue of traditional teacher power is less specific to Korea than is likely presented in the media: my father was subject to the same kinds of caning punishments that one need not look too far to see online. What I think is that violence is basically inherent to the system, and removing it, one must go through all kinds of backflips in order to make the system work.

    But I also think that, for the most part, a reliance on violence bespeaks incompetence — that is, to riff on both your other comment today, and on Asimov’s famous quotation, “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” — especially in the classroom.

    (I realize there is a small minority of students who are extremely resistant to normal forms of discipline. I think, though, it’s much better for all concerned if schools have a security officer who can drag a (say, violent, or noncoopeative) student out of a room if necessary, instead of a teacher having to do it.

    As to the resentment at loss of absolute power, all I can say is that jobs where people have absolute power seem to attract, among others, a certain kind of person… one who by all means should not be given absolute power. Mentally healthy adults will get over the loss of absolute power; the rest can either suck it up, or find a new job.

    To respond to the other problems individually:

    1) Apparently there’s really very little teachers can do to discipline really unruly students. NO matter how disruptive a student is to the class and school, you cannot expel them, and it’s hard to even kick them out of the class and into the principal’s office. This was done to keep the school from harming the student’s self-esteem. (However, it says nothing about the self-esteem of the kids who are being bullied upon or other kids in the class whose studies are being disrupted).

    First off, I think there’s a learning curve involved in figuring out how to deal with students when you can’t hit them for not playing along. This was going on when I was in school as a kid, actually: there were mixed attitudes towards teacher-student violence; I think by the time I got to high school it was verboten, but not before then, and kids knew that the strap was a possibility, as was random violence from specific teachers. They tended to use it in the form of example — to shame one individual and scare the others — but in some cases whole groups of kids got the strap. But lots of teachers were unwilling to use violence, and explored other methods of discipline, with mixed results. I think now they have a more routine system. Maybe Korean teachers could look to societies (not just the USA or Canada, but others) where teacher-student violence was banned in the past, as a springboard to developing more effective forms of discipline?

    Also, I’m dubious that it’s THAT hard to discipline kids. To me, it’s a question of competence: the most effective teachers I had were (a) interesting (so we were less eager to goof off), (b) respectful (so that we felt a natural desire to respect them back), and (c) could command a room’s attention by just being silent for a few moments. And these are all things that can be cultivated or learned.

    I’m also dubious that teachers are so desperate to find a way to discipline kids. My freshmen and sophomores claims all kinds of violence is routine, on the scale of “There’s always one, or a few teachers, at every school who use it.”

    On the other hand, I think it’s hard to discipline kids if you can’t boot ’em into the hall, send them to the principal’s office, or otherwise push them to straighten up and fly right. (And, it strikes me now, detention would be meaningless in a Korean high school, since anyway in many schools kids have a constant experience of what, for a Western kid, would be a constant bout of detention. Keeping a kid afterschool is not a punishment when everyone is being kept late after school. And what can you do, extend it to 2 am for the naughty kids?)

    2) Many people, including myself, wonder whether the Human Rights Commission of Korea is sane. They made a recommendation last year that elementary schools should not assign daily diaries as homework because it would be an invasion of privacy. (How stupid do the kids have to be, to write private thoughts in a diary that they know they have to hand in as homework?)

    Hmm. You might wonder whether I’m sane, but I think I’d need to know more about why they made the claim. Again, the things I hear from friends who were in the system recently, or who work in it, and the brush I had with the system a few years ago, lead me to think that while some teachers are wonderful, respectful of children as individuals and as human beings, there are also teachers who would simply not see the problem in publicizing what a kid had written. Which is problematic since, as you note, teachers see the kids more than parents in a lot of cases.

    I’ve had students (and heard of other cases) at the university level who reached out to me for help in a suicidal state, in a state of desperation about career options, because of family problems, or whatever, even though they didn’t know me. I would imagine schoolkids might to do the same with their teachers, who are not equipped or trained to deal with it, but who — like me — find a distinct lack of resources. (It’s hard to recommend on-campus counseling when student reports suggest that some of the counselors are disrespectful or outright nasty to students coming for help in a desperate state.)

    Anyway, the daily diaries thing is weird. You’d think that students could be told, “Don’t write anything that you don’t want me to know about you! Don’t write things that are too private!” or whatever. Like I said, I’m curious about the context of the ruling.

    (BTW: I’m not sure whether I’d say it’s just a question of intelligence, this skill of knowing what not to write in submitted work. I’ve had written work from students that included things like self-directed put-downs, confessions of plastic surgery, recountings of personal experiences of sexual assault, tangential complaints about other students or professors in the department, and so on. Some of the people writing these things were even relatively bright, but didn’t have a good grasp on the boundaries.)

    3) One of the rights that is being discussed is the right for children to demonstrate on behalf of the teachers (who may belong to the Teachre’s Union) – there’s a whole bunch of issue about standardized exams related to this, and it will take much too long to get into it – and some parents are worried that the teachers (who see the kids more than the parents, frankly), may misuse their inflence and/or demonstrations in Korea have the tendency to become violent due to fault of people on both/either side of the issue.

    Which to me sounds like parents who aren’t very involved in their kids lives, but rather than rectifying that, would rather just prevent their kids from being manipulated by preventing their kids from having the same rights that they themselves supposedly have — to protest, to get together and talk, and so on.

    After all, while you’re right here:

    As far as I know, no country gives non-adult students and children full civil freedoms.

    … I personally see that as a problem. I’ve mentioned before that one researcher discovered school kids in the US are subject to eight times as many restrictions as adults in the same society… and twice as many as active duty marines and prison inmates. (Here’s the PDF again, as I only touched on the topic in the post.)

    I suspect Korean kids are likely subject to an even higher number of restrictions across the board. And if Epstein’s right that it’s the degree of restrictions that lead to the acting out, then it’s hardly surprising how extreme are the kinds of “acting out” that is horrifying people in newspapers pretty much constantly these days.

    William,

    Well, of course, as a former RPG gamemaster, I think Confucius did have a point; it’s just that he didn’t have a satisfactory solution to the problem.

    The construction of Confucianism as it stands in Korea is a wholly different story. I’d rather not argue about its merits or demerits — I don’t see it as particularly better or worse than any of the other crazy ideologies used to prop men up above women and children, kings above lords above commoners, and , rich above poor, and one race above another (or all others).

    Which is to say, so much of what dominates the thinking of people today is bronze age trash bin fodder.

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