THE JEWEL OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
In 1993, when my brother was 15 and when I was 13, my parents decided to move to America. The primary reason for moving to America was to acquire American education. They decided to move then, before any later, in time for us to become fluent in English and get into good universities.
My mother, passionate about education and having been an educator herself, believed in more liberal & democratic approach to education, rather than authoritarian and rote-memorization based education system in Korea. She had transferred us from a public elementary school in our local neighborhood in Seoul, where she had taught herself, to a private elementary school founded by American missionaries in the middle of Seoul.
Teachers, rather than authoritarian figures who beat students up into discipline — a regular practice in Korean, were warm and caring figures who became children’s best friends. Teachers accepting gifts from parents was strictly forbidden in order to prevent favoritism. Rather than ordering students what to do, students got to vote on what they wanted to do. Classes were filled with a series of fun activities that felt like an extension of play time. Students loved coming to school and didn’t want to go home after school.
Such a utopian educational setting, however, was a rare exception in South Korea and things got progressively worse through the middle and high school years, as you started preparing for the infamous university entrance exam. You were expected to spend years of sleepless nights locked up in the library, rote-memorizing endless volume of materials, only to spit back on the exam, topped with egregiously expensive tutoring — if you could offered it — to maximize your performance on the exam.
Most Koreans were aware that their education system was unhealthy, but most ended up participating in it, with little prospect of change or reform, since your life prospect was determined by which university you went to. In fact, in Korea, your worth was determined by which university you went to, which followed you for the rest of your life.
My parents didn’t want us go through such a system. They consulted a number of friends and decided to move to a suburban town of New Jersey just outside of New York City, known to have an excellent public education system. Now thrown into the seventh grade in American education system, I started noticing, firsthand, how it was different from Korean education system: In Math class, for example, I was graded not just for getting the right answer, but showing HOW I arrived at the answer. In English class, I was graded not only for completing the assignments, but also for actively participating in the class discussions where I was encouraged to express what I saw and I thought. Rather than blindly accepting whatever the author was saying, I was expected to question whether what the author was saying was true. This reflected in preparation for the college entrance as well: you were evaluated not only for how well you performed on the standardized tests, but also how ‘well-rounded’ you were through extra-curricular activities and demonstration of leadership.
What we didn’t know about American education before arriving in America, however, was that there was, at the heart of American education, what was called ’liberal arts education.’ Rather than choosing a field of study at the onset of your university study, you spent the first two years exploring a wide range of subjects before choosing your major in your third year. The idea was to nurture well-rounded beings who could think across disciplines, before choosing a field of specialization by pursuing a graduate study. As it turned out, the top universities in America, including the Ivy League, had the liberal arts education as their core undergraduate curriculum.
My brother, who arrived in America as a ninth grader and had only three years to prepare for college, decided to go to an engineering school for university, considering that he was an ‘engineer’ in our family who could fix anything that was broken in our house, and he was good at math and science rather than humanities or social sciences. He had intuitive knowledge, without being taught, about computers and anything that had to do with mechanics. But in his third year of college, he came back home declaring that engineering was not the right fit for him and wanted to transfer to a design school. We started seeing how rushing into a field of specialization before getting to know about yourself or explore different subjects could backfire.
I had arrived in America aspiring to be a concert pianist, and when it was time for me to choose between going to a music conservatory or a university, my piano teachers encouraged me to go to a university, as they emphasized that it was not the technical mastery of an instrument that made a great artist, but a full development and maturity as a well-rounded human being. Having experienced what it meant to become really good at one thing at the expense of all else, I desired, more than anything else, to become well-rounded.
I started my undergraduate study as a dual degree student at a liberal arts college and a music conservatory in New York City, but after one year, I felt like I had to choose between the two, since being enrolled at a university while trying to maintain a rigorous level of music training in the level that I was used to didn’t allow me the very purpose of going to a university: to grow, develop and mature as a well-rounded human being. I was rushing off to a practice room as soon as I finished up my homework, with no room for social life, which felt like a continuation of my high school years. It felt like keeping both feet in the door was only taking away from full heartedly throwing myself into one or the other. I made what was then felt like a difficult decision: to leave music and throw myself into a university experience.
The university I transferred to in my second year, Penn, ironically had a ‘pre-professional’ atmosphere. It undoubtedly had liberal arts education at the center of its undergraduate education, but surrounded by glittering pre-professional schools, including the Wharton Business School. Wharton undergraduates invariably had fancy summer internships lined up on Wall Street, with a sumptuous salary topped with limo service to and from their luxury rental apartments in New York City. By graduation, they invariably had fancy investment banking job offers lined up with a 10K salary.
Many liberal arts students, anxious about their future and worried about not getting a job out of college, chose to double major in Humanities and something more ‘practical’ such as Economics to maximize their chance of getting a job out of college. Most were already set on going to either Law School or Medical School after college, some even switching from a pre-Med to a pre-Law overnight, and strictly followed the requirements of their chosen track, with no leisure to look around or explore different subjects. Some lost faith and patience in liberal arts altogether and transferred into Wharton altogether.
Because I didn’t have a very specific career goal coming out of music, I took courses widely — from Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Literature, Economics to Politics — in what genuinely stimulated my curiosity and interest, hoping to find another passion that could become my profession. I could hardly boil down a selection of courses each semester, from an endless catalog of courses that sounded so enriching and stimulating. I found being in liberal arts so full, so at home and grew, developed and matured intellectually throughout my undergraduate years, not knowing exactly where I was going or how exactly liberal arts education would translate into a career.
The dean of the liberal arts college, losing too many students to Wharton next door, set up a speaker series that invites in alumnae who went through the liberal arts program themselves to come back and give talks on how they found their career path out of college and how liberal arts education translated into their career. It was meant to encourage liberal arts students to keep up their faith and belief in the value of liberal arts education, even despite the fact that they didn’t see the clear career path forward.
I attended every one of these talks, hoping to find my path as a lost liberal arts student.
It wasn’t until I started teaching at a liberal arts college myself and seeing how the school struggled to have enough student enrollment that I began to see how difficult for a liberal arts college is to survive in the market place of higher education — since students wanted practical and sellable skills that could get them a job out of college. The liberal arts college also had a hard time finding faculty members who were willing and able to teach students across disciplines in the university’s core curriculum — to be able to forge a cross-disciplinary dialogue within the classroom, as most faculty felt comfortable teaching their own discipline and field of specialization that they were trained in.
Liberal arts education, what I thought was the jewel of American education and it wouldn’t be a hyperbole to say that it made my immigration to America worthwhile, jarred against the ethos of pragmatism in America.
How does liberal arts education translate into a career? Or does it translate? ‘It doesn’t,’ a college friend of mine said sardonically, after getting two Master’s degrees at Penn after an undergraduate degree there that ended him up on a huge pile of debt: ‘If I were to do it again, I would go straight to Wharton,’ he said. I told him, ‘If I were to do it again, I would start with liberal arts education again.’
In fact, I realized that I had already arrived at a ‘profession’ back in college without myself realizing it: an artist and intellectual of my own right who could think across disciplines, which was the essence of liberal arts itself. And true pragmatism turned out to be sharing insight harnessed from my own experience — what gave me a resolution — teaching solution for those looking to get the problem solved, rather than being trained in a practical skillset that was sellable at a high margin.
My intention of leaving music was to become well-rounded and develop, mature and grow as an artist, and I acquired it through the liberal arts education, which equipped me with all the tools I needed to be able to think critically across disciplines and articulate what I see as I see it. While the direction of American education was to go from general (liberal arts) to specialization (graduate school), I went from specialization (music) to general (liberal arts) and found myself home in it.
As Richard Rodriquez, a writer when asked in his American Purpose interview about how he would respond to a ‘buyer’s remorse’ of literature majors who felt that they should have chosen a more practical major that could get them a job, answered: ‘Having a liberal soul is the best possible outcome you could have of an education.’