“Yes, Everything is for Sale”

September 2, 2006
Dale Han

Frankly speaking, I was initially amazed, secondly dismayed, and lastly disheartened by your remark on the “commercialization of education” that you are less concerned and worried about the our college education system being run commercialized like the free market system of the supply and demand principle, and you would like to leave the matter in the invisible hand of God.

For the worse proposition, you’d like to take the commercialized education for granted a fait accompli, as you get more in return if you pay or invest more, and you disparaged educator’s buzzword, “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself”, as a tall catchphrase, adding that “a real life” begins at the society where we are becoming the self-made man.

It is true, I admit, that we live in a society that fathoms life in terms of numbers, like polls, statistics, ranks, percentage, dollars, Dow john’s averages, etc., and our education institution manufactures years after years a massive number of robotic technocrats who value a thing only in terms of numbers not in terms of humanity.

When you wander along the bustling street of the Fifth Avenue in the New York City, you’d find that a majority of pedestrians, drivers, deliverymen, and messenger boys on a bike, talks incessantly on a cellular phone with someone invisible on the other end of line…they are inattentive to or not interacting with their physical proximity.

Among the whole enchilada of diverse groups, you don’t have difficulty finding a gaggle of school age youngsters attached to iPod, CD cassettes, Cell-phones, or other gadgets in their own world…It’s a universe of “my space” where gadgets that are made to enhance greater communication only serve to separate us from humanity.

It is no wonder why we do not care about Others, those not in “my space”…we could not fathom how someone lives with one dollar a day at the opposite side of the “my space”, because we live in the world where one dollar does not bring much or many things to us.

As long as they do not infringe on “my space”, they are irrelevant and not being counted as numbers.
When we reflect on the purpose of education, one may say that it trains youngster’s mind in the facts, rules, formulas, numbers, and precepts in curriculum.

Other may say that it stretches the mind of students giving them skills to inquire and discuss ideas and beliefs that they can participate with their neighbors.

The bottom line is how we can balance above-mentioned reflections in its implementation…And I find that we tilted our system too much toward the former case that weighs more on numbers and formulas: and the latter case is more harder to be implemented, because it is a process, not a formula that can be compressed into a book or reflected with numbers.

In which term do you wish your sons and daughters after the school year being portrayed by your neighbors in the community?

A robotic technocrat with a prestigious diploma who lives only in his space?

Or a man of intelligence whose ideas and beliefs encompass for the betterment in the entire world of humanity?

Probably, I gather that you appear to reflect the money-grubbing characteristics on behalf of the ugly Korean immigrant community, in which a majority wishes to see their kids to be a dumb family doctor, an ambulance-chasing lawyer, an ever-squabbling stock, insurance, and mortgage broker, a spurious financier, an egotistic and Hispanic-bashing “deli-CEO”, a swaggering and unconscionable Church elder, etc., whose training had more to do with numbers and less to do with humanities.

Inshallah!!