Mary Choi

Have you never witnessed the violence in Korean highschools? I have. The beatings with sticks producing bruises, the punching on the head with knuckles, pinching and twisting of skin on the arms and face, the kicking. Students are made to kneel on a hard floor for 30 mins. to an hour and would be crippled at the end of this torture. Torture it is. When I taught in Gwangju (1998) this was a common thing and we foreign teachers would go home and not sleep from the stress. This culture of violence in schools infects students too. They are equally violent with their classmates (boys and girls). The gym teacher was even giving " bee resin medical treatments" with a reused needle to the girl students in his private office. This was going on at the height of the world AIDS epidemic. He came at me with the same dirty needle till I shouted at him. I left the highschool at the end of my contract and hear that things have improved nationally as parents are complaining more. Violence in schools was common in western schools too when my grandfather was a boy, 80 years ago. Postive social change takes a long time.