When the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star plays in her South Korean classroom, octogenarian pupil Nam Yang-soon sings along with classmates more than 70 years her junior.
With South Korea’s population aging rapidly and families migrating from the countryside to the cities for decades, rural primary schools are facing falling pupil numbers.
Now some are targeting the opposite end of the age spectrum and recruiting illiterate grandmothers who were denied education on gender grounds during their own childhoods to stave off the threat of closure and teach them to read and write.
Photo: AFP
“I have often felt like others looked down on me because of my illiteracy,” said Nam, who at 84 is the oldest of three grandmothers in second grade at Woldeung Elementary School.
Her favorite subject is mathematics.
“It is so much fun adding and subtracting numbers,” she chuckled, adding: “I want to be in school as long as my health allows me.”
South Korea has been a patriarchal society for centuries, with a long-ingrained preference for sons over daughters — obstetricians in the South are still banned from telling parents the sex of a fetus. Even as late as the 1960s, some South Korean girls did not to go to school, especially in the countryside.
“My grandfather insisted that girls like me had no use for education, said Park Young-ae, 70, one of Nam’s classmates at the school in Suncheon, in the southeast corner of the country.
“I always regretted I couldn’t set foot in school as a young girl,” she said.
Now she is enjoying the “best moments” of her life with four young classmates, she added, whether it is taking spelling tests or singing songs together.
As the South industrialized in the decades following the Korean War, vast numbers of people moved from the countryside to the growing cities in search of employment, prosperity.
The trend continues to this day — the number of people in farming families fell by nearly 70 percent in the 30 years to last year, figures from Statistics Korea show.
At the same time South Korea is facing a demographic crisis, with young people saying no to starting families in a society with a stagnant job market.
Woldeung Elementary School typifies the phenomenon. At its peak in 1968, it had 1,200 pupils. Now just 29 children attend.
The grandmothers’ much younger teacher, Choi Young-sun, 43, says she was “very nervous” about their presence at first, but they have proved a positive influence.
“I have observed my students behave in a much more mature and respectful manner than other children of their age,” she said.
At least three other schools in South Jeolla are known to have recruited grandmothers, but a provincial official declined to say how many had done so altogether.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS