Avigail Gutman, center, wife of Israeli Ambassador to Korea Uri Gutman, introduces herself to the audience as her name was called during the Korea-Israel Women's Association (KIWA) meeting at The Laum, a venue designed for social gatherings in southern Seoul, Thursday. Members of the friendship organization, established 17 years ago to facilitate cultural and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries, met for the first time since the Gutmans arrived in Seoul last year. / Courtesy of Lee Han-young



Inquisitive mind key to successful education; experts

By Kang Hyun-kyung



Korean and Jewish moms have a single-minded devotion to their children's success and put an overwhelming emphasis on education as a means to achieve it.

Korean students have been at the top of international tests measuring the performances of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science, outperforming their Jewish counterparts.

But the two groups' performances during and after higher education are reversed as data show that Koreans lag far behind Jewish people in terms of their accomplishments in world business and other key areas.

Observers indicated that Jewish children are trained to think, ask and challenge existing practices and this "Talmudic spirit" perhaps has a long-term effect on their life.

On Thursday, Avigail Gutman, the wife of Israeli Ambassador to Korea Uri Gutman, said that Jewish mothers put emphasis on helping their children develop inquiring minds.

"We encourage independent thinking and stress that our children always ask why and that they should never be content with an answer they are not fully grasping with or that doesn't make sense to them," she said in an interview with The Korea Times.

"They should challenge what they learn, even though this means they have to stand up to an adult or a figure of authority. This is the critical part of the Talmudic spirit."

Gutman, who is a working mother, said that one of the most joyful moments she has while raising her three children comes when she finds one of her kids takes the initiative in a creative or constructive activity on his own without direction from adults.

She said that Jewish mothers strive to expose their children to the world from the very moment their babies are born.

"We educate our children by giving them the tools to develop skills and become critical thinkers. We speak to them from the moment they are born, we read and sing to them, expose them to music and art and we play imaginary pretend-games with our children,"she said.

Gutman noted that the ordeals Jewish people have undergone in their over 5,000 years of history has also shaped their strong drive to succeed.

"During the times of persecution we were excluded from mainstream education and job opportunities and in some cases targeted for annihilation," she said. "To survive, we stuck together, engaged in learning on our own or when possible within academia, and we pursued trade and occupations that were open to us. We invented solutions that kept us alive and together as a nation."

Another Jewish mother Terri Hartman, president of Seoul International Women's Association, observed that Korean and Jewish societies both prioritize academic learning.

"For centuries, the Jewish people have been known as the people of the book. Studying and scholarly pursuits have been at the center of Jewish culture and studying and learning have been highly prized in the Jewish community," she said.

"The most respected in the Jewish community has been the scholar. Looking at the faces that Korea chooses to honor on its currency, perhaps the same can be said about Korea," she said.

Korean banknotes include the likeness of Confucian scholars of the Joseon Kingdom — Yi Hwang (1501-1570) and Yi I (1536-1584). Among them are also King Sejong (1397-1450) who invented Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, and female poet, writer and calligraphist Sin Saimdang (1504-1551).

Hartman noted that Jewish study involves rigorously questioning why and how things are done. "In these ways, Jewish moms are perhaps different from Korean moms," she said.



Correcting wrong

Koreans are well-known for spending huge sums on private tutoring for their children — a total of 20 trillion won ($19 billion) is spent annually.

After school, elementary school students go to cram private institutions to take middle school courses in advance, while middle school students preview courses they are to take in high school.

Children are exhausted as they have to study from early morning till late night, while parents are struggling to finance private tutoring for them.

Koreans' immense investment in education is one factor behind Korean students' outstanding performance in the Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Korean students, along with a few Asian students, have always been at the top since PISA assessed more than 500,000 15-year-old students from tens of countries every three years since 2000.

However, their performances suddenly make a sharp drop in post-secondary education and afterwards.

A recent study of 1,400 Korean students who attended top 14 U.S. universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, from 1985 to 2007 found that 44 percent of them dropped out.

The figure is much higher than that of Jewish students' 12.5 percent dropout rate, according to Kim Seung-gi, a scholar, in his dissertation at Columbia University.

The paper also found that Korean executives working with Fortune 500 companies stood merely 0.3 percent, compared with 41.5 percent of Jewish people. Jewish people account for 23 percent of Nobel laureates and also take the lion's share of success in key other areas.

Koh Jae-hak, a journalist and the author of the book "Do As Jewish Parents Do" (2010), offered his insight into what goes wrong with Korean students after they graduate high school.

In Korean education, Koh indicated, the joy of learning is lost and children are trained to earn the highest possible scores instead of questioning why and how things are done.

"If children are encouraged to see learning as something enjoyable rather than a stress factor, there will be a huge difference. Korean parents, whether they intended or not, constantly instill their children with the wrong idea that studying is no more than a means to get high scores," he pointed out.