industrial nations There s nothing that goes against the ambitious Koreans grain more than taking the easy way out novelist Hwang Sok yong writes as well 60 hour work weeks are the rule rather than the exception Pe ter Schreyer the German designer who has been draw ing sleek looking body shells for Hyundai and Kia since 2006 in a television documentary was obviously im pressed as well by the eagerness of the Koreans who he said were not only driven by personal ambition but also by pride in their country The Koreans hungry spirit is also manifest in ed ucation The competition for acceptance by a SKY uni versity is massive SKY stands for the three top Korean universities Seoul National Korea and Yonsei High school students spend up to 16 hours a day cramming for good grades in order to be accepted by one of the top universities If the young academic manages to grad uate with honors access to the coveted social elites is practically guaranteed Parents are willing to spend a major portion of their income on the education of their children However the educational frenzy paired with a fear of failure has a downside as well Korea is one of the countries with the highest teenage suicide rates Even so more and more foreign students are flock ing to South Korea Seoul already ranks in the top ten of the most popular student cities listed on the website of topuniversities com Like the country as a whole the number of universities has been seeing massive growth While Korea still had 70 colleges and universities in 1965 14 public and 56 private ones the number had more than tripled 50 years later 46 public and 179 private ones The educational turbo has produced a country wide aca demization level of 70 percent As a result many gradu ates are no longer able to find adequate jobs at home and start looking abroad so it s definitely within the realm of possibilities that a young couple will follow my parents example and seek their fortune in Germany THE AUTHOR Martin Hyun was born in 1979 in Krefeld Germany and since 1993 has been a happy German citizen Hyun studied political science and international relations in the United States and Belgium He made headlines as the first ice hockey Bundesliga pro of Korean descent and as a player in Germany s National Junior Division His first book was published in 2008 In his bestseller Gebrauchsanweisung für Südkorea User Man ual for South Korea he reveals for instance why you have to stand your ground in the Korean triath lon eating drinking singing Frenchman Jacques Debs According to Hwang the pro cess of modernization overran Korea within a very short period of time In the view of the novelist who doesn t shy away from controversy in addition to the ability of carefully weighing and challenging decisions social justice fell by the wayside as well In fact according to an OECD study Korea in spite of significant increases in recent years is still spending less than 15 percent of its gross domestic product on social benefits and ser vices For comparison France and Finland spending over 30 percent of their GDP are deemed front runners in this respect Like in many industrial nations the gap be tween rich and poor keeps widening in Korea too Another issue In terms of old age poverty Korea ranks in one of the less than pleasant top spots among the leading industrial nations as well This is also part ly attributable to the fact that the rapid social transfor mation has made the model of large families in which the members support each other obsolete Many retirees feel useless fear that they won t be able to make ends meet and would rather end their life voluntarily than live in undignified conditions Policies to counter this trend are urgently needed in the light of demographics reflect ing fewer and fewer young people that will be able to sup port their elders Korea s birthrate is one of the lowest in the world One in two Korean women doesn t want to have any children at all a choice also driven by the fear of being pushed into the role of homemaker and mother In terms of emancipation Korea s male dominated soci ety has some catching up to do as well The hungry spirit of the Koreans The country s technological upswing initiated and planned by Park Chung hee was massively accelerated by another factor the Koreans hungry spirit as my uncle a successful civil engineer from Seoul likes to call it This unbridled and unbending will to make a believ er out of the world has a major part in Korea s evolu tion from a developing country into one of the leading Lights as prosperity indicators Whereas South Korea rose to the level of a rich high tech nation the North remains in the poverty of the post war years and in darkness at nighttime global 23

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