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willowy girl lurched back from the blow.
    Even the students supported the teachers’ prerogative to hit them. In 2003—when corporal punishment was starting to disappear—a survey conducted by a Korean NGO representing
teachers indicated that
fully 70 percent of Korean students said that corporal punishment was fair.
2 The Korean newspaper
JoongAng Daily
reported at the time that students in the same survey said that the “honor” (I assume this means social status) of teachers had “eroded.” But the real jaw dropper is that a
third of the respondents “criticized themselves and their parents for not respecting teachers enough.”
    Students criticized themselves and their own parents, rather than the teacher? In other words, students felt that teachers could do no wrong.
    This might sound like Stockholm syndrome, but it’s much more complicated than that. The roots of teacher worship go back literally a thousand years.
    THE ARISTOCRACY EXAMS
    Confucius, the Chinese sage who lived in the fourth century BC , was not just an author of fortune cookie quotes. His writings laid down a
regimented system for making an orderly society out of chaos.
    Confucianism didn’t really get into full swing in Korea until its second wave—called neo-Confucianism—in the fourteenth century AD .
    The rulers adopted neo-Confucianism partly as an excuse to overthrow the old aristocracy (with whom they were fed up). Under this new system, anyone could become an aristocrat. All they had to
do was pass an excruciating civil service exam, called the
kwako
. 3
    In other words, the Korean political system was a meritocratic aristocracy—what an incredible oxymoron. A man from all but the very lowest classes had the right to sit for the
kwako
(originally instituted in the tenth century). Not only was it really hard, but it was also administered only once every three years. In a given exam year, only a hundred or so people
would pass, out of thousands of applicants.
    If you passed it, you were instantly given the title of
yangban
—you became an aristocrat. Not only that, but your whole family line was upgraded in the process. There’s a
catch, though. A big one. Your male heirs have to pass the
kwako
exam as well. If your descendants failed the exam three generations in a row, you and your family were stripped of the
yangban
title and went back to being nobodies. Does this not sound like something out of Grimms’ fairy tales?
    Ever since then, Korean students have been studying as if their lives, their family’s lives, and the future lives of their entire bloodline depended on it. The
yangban
system
technically disappeared at the end of the nineteenth century, but apparently, one hundred years is not long enough to shake off tradition. Confucianism in Korea is at the weakest point it’s
ever been, but it still has not completely released its hold on the education system.
    How much has teacher worship changed in recent decades—between my school days and the present day? I can think of many examples of teachers abusing the power that society unquestioningly
bestowed on them. But the government education officials I met seemed to think quite a lot had changed. They were proud of the abolition of corporal punishment, for example. And they said they had
made significant strides in reducing the importance of rote memorization in favor of creativity.
    They were obviously depressed, however, about the erosion of respect for teachers. Lee Dong-ho, the NIIED director, told me, “Compared to the past, students’ parents are just as
educated as the teacher, so there is a lot of friction between teachers and parents about the students.”
    The reason why Korean schoolteachers don’t command as much respect as before is that for the last decade, Korean students have given their attention to private after-school learning
centers, called
hakwons
. It’s an open secret that students pay less attention to their public schoolteachers now