Revisionist History Ep.4 - Carlos Doesn't Remember

Looking at the long Korean history, most dynasties had the status system. In the society with the status system, the birth determined one’s occupation, and the door to become high-ranking officials was opened only to the person who is of a noble birth. However, as there were many people of talent among lowly people who is likely to contribute a lot to a nation, highly praised kings tried to alleviate the barrier between the status and tried hard to open offices according to their talents, not their births. Eventually, the status system was abolished now, and it’s hard to find other nations with caste system except for India. Nonetheless, we are living in a new hierarchy society, and people can’t rise from humble family anymore. If born poor, he or she can’t catch up the with the rich regardless of how hard he or she tried.

What Malcolm Gladwell tried to convey through his 4^th podcast ‘Carlos Doesn’t Remember’ also reflects these grim actualities. He said that civilized society should offer the opportunities for the people to reach their potential, and capitalization, not GDP nor per capita income, should be the standard that determines how successful and just the society is. Then, he asked if we are good at capitalization; the answer was no when it comes to the case of Carlos, at least.

Because of the title of the podcast, I wondered what he doesn’t remember. Carlos, a low-income student who is outstandingly intelligent, could have received full tuition from top private boarding school, but he chose not to go there. He wanted to learn, but he had to take care of his family, who are against his going to the private high school. For a while, he had been to the prestigious school with the full tuition aid, but he said he was overwhelmed and self-conscious. The teacher said he was not getting along with other students, saying that his sneakers were 3 sizes bigger than his size, but Carlos didn’t remember that. He forgot all the bad things happened to him and chose to go back to public school and take care of his family. He was exceptionally brainy, but he was not able to reach his potential and be capitalized because of his poverty.

In the world, there are many other students like Carlos, including 35,000 impoverished but intelligent students in the U.S. In South Korea, there are many poor but outstandingly talented students, as well, but they soon become normal students. In Korea, most of the students go to hagwons (private institutes) or use private tutors. Schools, especially the private schools premise that every student goes to such private academies, and the teachers, in most case, don’t even try to explain the basics. In these educational environments, the poor students who were not able to receive help from the private tutors can’t learn what they need to know properly, and they begin to fall behind in the competition.

The government always says they will try hard to alleviate educational polarization caused by the income differentials and to capitalize the poor prodigies. What the government does is to establish education institutes for the gifted and make rules so that prestigious high schools should offer financial aids to the low-income child. However, even those classes are often occupied by the children from a comfortably well-off family. In this way, the children from the family in penury are deprived of their chances to be educated and lag far behind, not being able to go to prestigious high schools nor distinguished colleges. Without the diploma prestigious schools, finding a job goes against them, and it becomes even more difficult to accomplish the rise of their status. Even worse, the government sometimes seems like they don’t care about alleviating the gap between the rich and poor. For instance, the government said that the bar examination will be abrogated and law school system which is very expensive in Korea will be adopted.

KMLA, the school that I attend, says that the purpose of KMLA is to breed up the capable people so that they can become the leader of our nation. However, KMLA’s tuition fee is the most expensive among the high schools in KMLA, and KMLA used 0 won to support students financially last year. Not only KMLA, but there are many other prestigious high schools usually requires very expensive tuition fees. Though most of the schools have financial aid systems, it is very hard to find impoverished students in such schools, including KMLA. There must be many factors. First of all, the image that students in KMLA are born in an opulent family might make the students hesitate to apply for KMLA. Also, though students from low-income families can be provided with financial aid so that they don’t have to pay for the tuition, students in KMLA cannot survive the competition without incidental spending on taking private lessons. Also, as KMLA locates far from where most of the students live, transportation expenses cost a lot as well. 

In modern capitalism society, winner takes it all. The winner who is rich has much more opportunities to be learned and opportunities to success than the poor. Unfortunately, there is no practical and feasible solution that can solve the problem perfectly. The more difficult it is to solve this problem, privileged students, including students in KMLA should be thankful for our situations and try to help others so that they can be provided equal opportunities in living their lives and displaying their endless capabilities. As one of the so called privileged student, I personally think that I took other’s opportunities and capacities, so I think we should pay them back as a price of using theirs. I hope many other people in the world think the same way.