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.
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