Former Ambassador of the Republic of Korea to the United States
Dr. Sungchul Yang
CAPE Luncheon Lecture
The Willows Restaurant (Honolulu, HI)
January 20, 2010
"The Future of Korea-U.S. Relations"
Dr. Sungchul Yang
Special CAPE Lecture at the University of Hawaii at Manoa
January 13, 2010
Listen to Dr. Sungchul Yang's Speech (right click to save)
Transcript:
Aloha! Welcome to Hawaii! A paradise in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! We are lucky and blessed to be here this year at this time because not only Korea but many other parts of the world are now confronting unusually harsh and freezing cold winter. We have been worrying seriously about the impending calamity of “global warming,” but, instead, people are actually suffering from “global freezing” this winter.
Before I make a few remarks today, I would like to share a couple of memorable points with you at the outset.
First of all, January 13th, is a historic day for Koran-Americans in Hawaii and the United States. 107 years ago today in 1903, 102 first group of Koreans landed in Honolulu, Hawaii, by a ship, S.S. Gaelic, from Inchon, Korea. Then it took three weeks from Inchon to Honolulu by ship; now it takes about 8 hours by air.
Second, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the Center for Asia Pacific Exchange (CAPE) under which program you came here today.
During the last 30 years, I understand that the CAPE family has grown to nearly 9,000 members. Behind this impressive accomplishment, there must have been a host of people who have backed, toiled and persevered to make the CAPE programs “a great success.”
Among these helpers, organizers and managers, I believe one person outstands and outshines all others. He is none other than Dr. Jai Ho Yoo, the founder of the CAPE and Asia Pacific College, my friend of long standing. In fact, he is more like my “hyongmim” in Korean, an extraordinary individual and a man of indomitable spirit.
I am certain that for the past three decades, he has not only experienced a sense of fulfillment in devoting his energy and time to the development of the CAPE, but encountered huge frustrations and many disappointments as well.
I am even more certain, however, that in the end he will have gained a great satisfaction of having helped many students and professionals around the Asia-Pacific region to become better equipped with English and understand American culture and society.
Finally, this year is the 50th anniversary of the East West Center at the University of Hawaii. I heard on the news yesterday that Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, was here on the UH campus to commemorate this milestone event.
45 years ago, Dr. Yoo and I, as grantees of the Center, came here and studied at the UH. As I mentioned in the above, Dr. Yoo has been working tirelessly in bridging the culture gap between East and West, true to the founding spirit and aim of the East West Center half a century ago.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the first British Nobel laureate in literature (1907), wrote in a ballad that “East is east and West is west and never the twain shall meet,” which is now outdated as is the word, ‘twain’. In this age of globalization and Information Technology (IT) revolution, East and West are so inexorably meshed and mingled that it is difficult to separate one from the other.
In this context I must point out that Dr. Yoo has been one of those rare trailblazers in bringing East and West together for the past thirty years. I wish him good health and good luck so that he can continue to provide his praiseworthy work for many more years to come. Congratulations to Dr. Yoo!
Let me now focus on today’s lecture. I understand that all of you are English teachers from the middle and high schools in Korea. I have been a student and an educator of political science for nearly half a century (though personally, I have been, more politically inclined than scientifically bent).
Thus, I am not sure how helpful or valuable my talk about English or English teaching will be to you. With this caveat in mind, I will venture to tell you a couple of things about English teaching and a life of learning in general.
First, as all of you probably know already, English is not simply a foreign language, but a survival tool for anyone who wants to succeed in this highly global, knowledge-based, IT-oriented world.
Not only in internet, business, trade, travel, transportation, entertainment, science and technology, international conferences, international organizations, professional books and journals and legal and judicial hearings, but virtually in all human activities and endeavors, English has become an integral and indispensable skill for anyone who strives to survive and succeed in a global world.
Already English is now spoken more by the non-native speakers than native speakers and in many more foreign countries than those nations whose official language is English, such as the Great Britain, the U.S. and Australia. By extension, a lot more English listening, writing and other usages are practiced in countries where English is not an official language.
Second, not just learning English, be they writing, speaking, or listening, but learning in a broader sense of the word (self-learning, self-actualization) is a life-long process. Learning and teaching are neither limited to a particular age group nor confined to school compound or educational facilities. There are plenty of people who are not schooled but learned and, conversely, schooled but unlearned. Of course, there are many people who are both schooled and learned.
For example, do you know what is the commonality of such religious and/or eminent philosophical figures as Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed (570-632), Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama, 563-483 B.C.), Confucius (551-479 B.C.) and Socrates (470-390 B.C.)? Does anyone know the answer to this question?
They never went to school; then, no schools existed. Contemporary examples abound as well. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, didn’t finish beyond the freshman year at Harvard. So was Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, Inc., dropped out of Oregon’s Reed College. Erik Erikson (1902-1994), a German-born American scholar, who did not hold a bachelor’s degree, became a professor at Harvard Medical School and pioneered in the discipline of psychoanalysis.
By illustrating the above examples, I am not urging you or students to give up their teaching and schooling, and go to deserts or deep and rugged mountain valleys and to become a hermit or an outcast. All I am saying is that we must learn until we leave this world. Teachers and students alike must learn and acquire general knowledge as well as specialized areas of learning with open and inquisitive mind.
As 3 Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) are basic and crucial to student’s learning, I believe that anyone who strives to keep abreast with the rapidly transforming world must avoid the booby trap of 3 Rs (rest, rust, rot).
All livings things, including human beings, must rest some time. That is why we have sleeping hours, weekends, breaks, holidays, vacations, sabbatical leaves and the like. But too much rest makes one’s mind and body rust and even worse, leads to rot.
Thirdly, be alert and try to find the opportunity to “get out of your own box.” Often unconsciously, we are trapped in our own box—the life of routine day-in and day-out.
On this score, teachers are relatively less vulnerable to this routine trap, because unlike other professions and occupations, we have summer and winter vacations.
For example, as you are doing now, you can travel overseas and/or take part in profession-related programs or activities. You can engage in professional improvement, go sightseeing, meet and mingle with people. In the process, you may acquire new opportunities and insight and broaden your views and perspectives.
There are many ways to get out of the box. For instance, instead of using the same text books all the time, adopt the latest and more interesting text books. Take even bolder steps by letting your students read some classic works, be they poetry, plays, short stories or novels. By doing so, not only students but teachers, too, are compelled to read or reread the assigned materials and minimize boredom.
Let me give you a concrete example. I am currently reading Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo[i] and in it I found the following sentence:
He hates an infidel much less than a heretic, and prefers a heathen many times to an infidel.
If I want to teach students three kinds of believers or nonbelievers such as infidels, heretics and heathens, or adherents, atheists and agnostics in ordinary mundane English textbooks, students may not be excited to learn about their differences.
But if students are assigned to read a novel and find out the differences of the aforesaid three categories, I am sure that they will be far more inspired, curious and motivated.
Finally, I would like to share with you what I called “the hazard of judgment.” The moment we are awake till we are asleep in bed, we make countless decisions daily. In all the decisions, judgments, evaluations or tests we make day in and day out, we are prone to make mistakes, misjudgments or plain errors. Simply put, no human being is perfect. After all, as a saying goes, to err is human, and to forgive is divine.
Personally, I believe that there are five types (or levels) of judgment in a broader sense. By using two variables—duration under which a decision is being made and the truthfulness or “the degree of fallibility” of judging the cases, subjects and persons, the following categorization (examples) may be possible from the most fallible to the least fallible.
- Testing, grading and evaluating students in the school by teachers or other testers; betting in the horse race or gambling of all sorts; reporting and broadcasting in mass media; popularity rating of notables through surveys, bickering, quarreling or squabbling in political arena.
- Sentencing in the court (adjudication); legal inquest; religious inquisition (e.g., the Roman Catholic Inquisition in the Middle Ages), ideological charges and countercharges (e.g., the Cold War), political alignment or division (e.g., U.S. Congressional hearings on “un-American activities).
- Scientific Discovery and Scholarly research (e.g., laboratory experiment, field study and observation, archaeological excavation, data analysis, etc.).
- Historical Inquiry
- The Last Judgment.
Out of the above five kinds of judgment, four are man-made, thus, not error-free. Only the divine judgment is error-free.
In teaching, for instance, as you do in your classrooms, I have also tested my students in the classroom perhaps thousands of time during my teaching career.
Looking back, however, we praise and are prone to favor students whose test scores are high, and intentionally or unintentionally, we often neglect and even treat those underperforming students rather harshly.
But you and I know that, as one swallow does not make summer, one test score does not, cannot, and should not determine or measure a student’s ability or potential, let alone his/her future career.
To conclude, judging human beings in general, and teaching, testing, grading and evaluating students at schools in particular are extremely hazardous. Testing and testing results of students must not be the yardstick of reward and punishment. To the teachers and students, bad results mean it is time for self-reflection; that is, what went wrong with teaching and learning. For good results, it is a momentum to further improve both teachers’ skills and students’ learning.
We should not only teach students but learn from them. Education is and should be a two-way process. It should not be only a mutually reinforcing process of learning words and numbers, paragraphs and matrices, but a process of acquiring skills, knowledge and expertise in a particular area like English.
To recap, formal schooling or training may have a time limit, but learning is a life-long process. Education should lead to maturing of a human being, that is, he or she becomes more discreet, open-minded, caring and modest. Mahalo!
- Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), a famous American dancer, and George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), an Irish Playwright.
- Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Nancy Astor (1879-1964), an American-born British politician who was the first woman elected to the House of Commons (1919-1945), ugly v. sober and coffee and poison.
- Moses, Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein.
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[i] Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, with an Introduction and Notes by Brent Hayes Edwards (New York: Barnes & Nobles, 2004), p. 159