A soft-spoken electrical engineer named Edmond Rhim sat in a packed gymnasium with his wife, Hanna, gripping her tiny hand in his. It was the last of four five-hour-long sessions of Father School, and by the end of the night, 70 men — all of them Korean, and almost all of them Christian — would be declared more emotionally adjusted dads. They would even get a certificate, a group photo and a polo shirt to prove it.

“She’s happy now,” Rhim said, smiling.

Hanna nodded her head. “I love my husband,” she said. “But he is” — she searched for the right bit of recovery jargon — “under construction.”

Like many of the men in the room, Rhim never wanted to come to Father School. (Seven dropped out after the first day.) “I’m not a bad father,” he told me a week earlier. But realizing how difficult it was for him to relate to his wife and two teenage kids — and realizing, finally, how empty that left him — he paid the $120 course fee and agreed to show up.

Father School has been helping Korean men like Rhim become more emotionally aware since 1995, when it started at the Duranno Bible College in Seoul. The mission, drawn up at the height of the Asian financial crisis, was to end what the Father School guidebook calls “the growing national epidemic of abusive, ineffective and absentee fathers.”