College Admissions and Fairness Discourse Among People in Their 20s

A high school student wrote a paper. How strange does that sound? We are told the student came to write it while interning at a medical science research institute. And we are told the paper was published in an SCI-level journal. How strange does that sound now? Let’s consider another story. A student with a professor for a father received a university scholarship. How much deprivation does that evoke? We are told the student’s grades were low, and that the scholarship was awarded not just once but consecutively. How strong does that sense of deprivation feel now?

This is exactly how people in their twenties have, on average, felt about the recent controversy involving Cho Kuk’s daughter: a sense of incongruity and deprivation. In a very short period, an enormous number of controversies erupted, and Cho Kuk, in his own way, addressed them one by one as they circulated. Even so, there is something the older progressive generation, which has accepted Cho Kuk’s explanations and tried to “protect” him, has missed. The source of that sense of incongruity and deprivation does not lie in any illegal acts Cho Kuk may have committed.

If Cho Kuk’s own explanation is to be believed, his daughter did nothing illegal. Let us, for the moment, set aside the fact that a high school student authored a paper that she could never have written on her own and had it published in a journal as first author—an act that amounts to a deception of the discipline itself. Many people in their twenties do not even strongly feel the unfairness of that aspect, and scholars masquerading as academics but acting as rent-seekers have offered the absurd defense that “things like that happen in our lab too,” with the result that even this has come to seem not particularly illegal in South Korea.

Then why do people in their twenties feel despair and anger when they look at Cho Kuk’s daughter? Because her case violates the fairness discourse they carry in their minds. People in their twenties share broadly similar standards when it comes to fairness. More precisely, there is a standard among them that has hardened into something like a definition. And at the core of that standard lies the college admissions system. It is through that system—the one that pushed them into cram schools from high school, often from middle school, and in a broader sense from elementary school, while presenting them with only a single possible future—that they internalize this discourse of fairness.

That fairness discourse, then, is this: first of all, everyone must be on the same track. A track where one person runs a marathon, another does a triathlon, and someone else sprints is unfair. Add a little more reasoning, and even if the track is the same, differing means of movement are also unfair. That is because, in essence, it is no different from being on different tracks. And Cho Kuk’s daughter changed tracks through a two-week internship at a medical science research institute, and changed her means of movement by receiving a scholarship despite coming from a wealthy household and having low grades. Seen through the fairness discourse of people in their twenties, she lived a life that was almost a symbol of unfairness itself.

But can this kind of fairness discourse really be considered healthy? If we are to realize fairness exactly as people in their twenties imagine it, we would have to create a game in which everyone runs on the same track with the same physical conditions and the same equipment. The “perfect” realization of fairness becomes synonymous with the erasure of individuality. Can we call a value an ideal if the more fully it is realized, the further it leads us down the wrong path? In that sense, the current fairness discourse of people in their twenties is fundamentally mistaken. But that does not mean people in their twenties themselves are to blame for having formed this distorted discourse of fairness.

From the moment they entered elementary school until they graduated from high school, public institutional education made today’s twenty-somethings familiar with the ideology of meritocratic effort: if you work hard, you will succeed, and therefore you must work hard to succeed. Parents, the media, and private education reinforce this. Over 12 years, students moving through the public education system encounter and absorb many different variations of this ideology of effort. It reaches its peak around the end of the college admissions process. But it does not collapse once admissions are over. On the contrary, it dons the mask of reality as an absolute truth, and the mask of an ideal as justice itself.

Among some people in their twenties, there have also been attempts to connect this fairness discourse to a so-called “liberal” conception of justice. These people argue that the anger and despair directed at Cho Kuk’s daughter—especially the anger and despair of those now attending elite universities who are, in their own words, not essentially different from Cho Kuk’s daughter—are themselves distorted. Their reasoning is that under standardized public education governed by a uniform admissions system, no one can be said to have succeeded purely by their own efforts. Everyone, in one way or another, benefits from their socioeconomic background, and even from genetic factors. Therefore, they argue, the fairness discourse of people in their twenties should not remain at the level of negative emotional expression toward Cho Kuk’s daughter, but should become an opportunity to rethink fairness itself and consider what a properly grounded form of social justice would look like.

But in truth, the socioeconomic backgrounds of those leading these attempts are themselves, by and large, those of the privileged. In other words, the very people who are “not essentially different from Cho Kuk’s daughter,” by their own admission, are telling those who feel despair and anger at cases that violate their sense of fairness that such feelings are wrong. This approach is malicious because it says that cases like Cho Kuk’s daughter’s are not really things that should provoke despair and anger, but are, in their experience, fairly ordinary. At once, it claims that privileged people like themselves have done nothing wrong, while also justifying the bizarre worldview of fairness held by people in their twenties. For those who have run on unfair tracks to say, with their own mouths, that they themselves did nothing wrong but that fair tracks are nevertheless important is breathtaking hypocrisy. Is this not precisely the point on which Cho Kuk is now being socially condemned?

The reason this strange worldview of fairness among people in their twenties emerged—and the reason it has, in its own way, succeeded in justifying itself among them—is that this generation has lived lives completely subordinated to public education dominated by a uniform admissions system. In the past, people would often, half against their will, find ways to avoid being subordinated to such a structure, but that is no longer the case today. Compared with the past, a far greater number of people now live under the influence of a uniform admissions system. The proportion of people leading such subordinated lives has grown so large that people say everyone goes to college. In such a situation, the ideology of effort as a way of surviving within this admissions system could not help but present itself to people in their twenties as an entire worldview.

In a society where everyone goes to college, the admissions system is bound to dominate institutional education. Therefore, unless the admissions system is fixed, institutional education cannot change. Supposed solutions along the lines of “let’s make it possible for some student at some high school to intern at a research institute and write a paper too” are not genuine change. Through such an approach, the essence of a uniform admissions system remains completely untouched. It amounts to nothing more than taking the uniform admissions system as a given and proposing that the means of movement once used by the upper class should now be distributed to everyone else as well. The result, naturally, is the expansion and reinforcement of the ideology of effort through intensified competition.

The current College Scholastic Ability Test is a textbook example of exactly this situation. Among people in their twenties, the CSAT has become something like a symbol of the ideology of effort—the belief that anyone can succeed if they study hard in the proper way. In reality, however, CSAT results also tend to vary according to parents’ socioeconomic backgrounds. To use a slightly more elaborate metaphor, it is as if, after distributing the same means of movement to everyone, the upper class responded by changing their own physical conditions. That is why an approach that says experiences once reserved for certain people should simply be made available to others cannot be a fundamental solution; it only deepens the problem.

Therefore, if we want to prevent later generations from entering society and making South Korea even sicker by repeating or intensifying the pathological discourse now found among people in their twenties, we must break up the uniform structure of the admissions system. The current system works by having the government determine the gateway to university. Since the Park Geun-hye administration’s policy of simplifying university admissions tracks, it has arguably reached the point where the government effectively “creates” the gateway itself. That is where the current uniformity of the admissions system comes from. This uniformity can disappear only when full authority to select students is transferred to universities—in other words, only when the admissions process is fully liberalized. And only then will the deformed discourse of fairness, which is logically equivalent to insisting that individuality must be erased, cease to appear.

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Original title: 입시와 20대 공정 담론

Author: Young-jun Kim

Date: 2019-08-28

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=18&idx=20460