Before I left Seoul I had planned to write a follow-up portrait of my experience with the education system there. If first grade was about the training of protocol and relationships between people in the system, second grade, for me, was about the training of academic anxiety. In my first-grade post I was able to watch the jockeying for status and alliance as well as the expression of academic anxiety with a sense of humor and distance, but the longer I lived in Seoul the more I found myself acting and thinking in ways which betrayed an unconscious assimilation of the values of the system.

Even though I knew I would leave, five years spent breathing the air of the pressure cooker system has reshaped my sense of what a well-rounded childhood should be, has molded my sense of what a responsible parent should teach his or her children, and has provided me with an additional set of narratives to draw upon when thinking about success and failure, class difference, and global power dynamics.

It would be easy to blast the Korean education system. I could, as others have, talk about the unnecessary competitiveness, the fixation on Seoul National University and a job at Samsung, the rampant bribery, the reliance on private tutoring which impedes social mobility, the use of violence in schools, the problems with bullying, the over-reliance on testing and memorization. It is harder, I think, to describe and appreciate the difficulty of opting out.

A few months ago W came home with the assignment to write four bars of music in 3/4 time which he, having taken no music lessons, didn?t know how to do. I hadn?t looked at a piece of music in two decades and it took a while to pry the necessary teaching out of my crusty brain. I realized with surprise that we were in the situation I had heard so much about — because hakwon (sometimes translated as ?cram school?) attendance is assumed, kids who don?t go to hakwon can?t keep up at school. When I think of hakwon I usually think of English hakwon; although public schools start teaching English from at least 3rd grade, kids who actually begin at that age are already far behind. But music, art, math, and early preparation for the next year of school are also common enough to become standard. Since almost all the kids in W?s class have studied a musical instrument from first grade, the teacher expected that they would all know how to do the assignment. Although my husband and I, concerned with possible ADD and with W?s stress level, had just several weeks adjusting W?s schedule in order to give him more consistency and more playtime, I immediately began thinking of ways to squeeze in some piano lessons. My instinct was not to spend time raging at the system but to think of ways to win for W the ability he needed in order to keep up.

It is in moments like these that the unarticulated desires emerge. I have long term goals for W, driven by an ongoing wish to correct the deficiencies of my own childhood and education, which shape the small tortures I put him through now. And while language is a big part of those goals, protecting his sense of self-worth for the long term is a bigger priority. I?ve read those books that talk about how boys in particular can check out of school from an early age if they start to feel stupid or incapable of doing the work. I have to decide, in that moment, whether it is better for my son to have less free time and take more lessons in order to keep up with the standard, or if it is better to guard and guarantee for him a childhood in which he has time to follow his own interests and play. Until now I have fallen on the ?play? end of the spectrum, but how many hours of daily play do I cordon off for him? The longer I am surrounded by people whose 8-year-old kids come home from hakwon at 10pm the more my concept of the number of acceptable hours diminishes.

Second grade in Korea was hard for my son. His first grade teacher was strict but caring; when W (who hadn?t studied much hangeul before) went from 20% to 80% on his dictation tests she was full of praise for his improvement. W?s second grade teacher ruled like a dictator, hitting the kids? hands with a ruler when they misbehaved and scolding them for every small infraction. One night when I was putting him to bed he told me with despair and certainty that he must be a 멍청이 — stupid, a dullard. ?I don?t understand everything the teacher says.?

Last year as part of my classroom duties I served as a volunteer teacher, teaching English conversation to 6th graders in W?s school twice a month. I spent the first class sussing out their ability and interests in order to make the syllabus and was surprised that the students suggested debating topics like euthanasia and the FTA agreement. But there was a huge gap in ability between the students who had lived abroad (perhaps a fourth of the students in that class) and the students who had not. (The numbers aren?t representative because my son went to school in a district that is wealthier than most.) There was no way for the students who had not lived abroad to compete with those who had; they were doomed to lag behind. The practice of sending kids abroad to escape the pressure-cooker Korean education system has become common enough that kids who haven?t had that privilege cannot compete, and in a system in which kids are constantly ranked against each other, the gap between rich and poor is only growing larger. Parents send their kids abroad so that their kids can learn English (seen as necessary both for college entrance as well as job prospects) and also in order to have something of a real life (playing, exercising, etc.), but many also make sure that the kids eventually return to Korea so that they gain both the academic and social skills/connections required to be successful in Korea. However difficult this may be on the kids themselves, the parents feel they have covered all their bases; the kids will have the option of living in either society. A difficult childhood is seen as a fair trade for a more certain future. But the unintended side effect of that practice is an upward spiral of academic pressure in Korea itself. In some neighborhoods, being fluent in English and Korean and having lived abroad is becoming the standard, especially among those in the upper or upper-middle classes. And for those who are just middle class, sending a kid abroad (even if it is alone) is seen as the ticket to breaking through to a higher social-economic status.

A new hakwon market now caters to kids who have spent a few years abroad. My younger son?s kindergarten now runs an after-school program which teaches the American curriculum to elementary school kids. Most of these kids have lived in the U.S. for one or more years and are now attending Korean school, but their parents don?t want the kids to lose their language ability nor their familiarity with the vocabulary and methodology of the American educational system. The kids are effectively getting schooled twice, maintaining a foothold in both Korean and American educational and cultural systems.

As familiarity with both English and Korean becomes more of standard, parents and college students soon to be on the job market are looking increasingly towards other languages as a way of getting ahead of the pack. My Chinese classes in Seoul were populated by college students who told me that because the job market was flooded with English speakers, they were relying on their ability to speak Chinese in order to stand out and get a good job. When I found a Chinese teacher for my older son I needed to recruit some other kids his age to study with him in order to defray the cost of having the teacher come to our neighborhood. I was surprised how eager his classmates? moms were to have their kids take on another language; the class ended up being composed of kids who already spoke English quite well (although for the most part hey hadn?t lived abroad).

My neighborhood, as I noted, isn?t typical, but I think it speaks to larger interpretation of the position of Korea in the world and the ways that people respond to pressures of this historical moment. Korea has only recently been awarded ?first-world? status, so on one hand I think there is a sense that Korea has arrived economically, but with the giant of China trailing close behind, Japan still looming out of reach in front, and the U.S. (to whom Korea is tied economically, militarily, and politically) teetering, this status is tenuous and ethics of self-sufficiency, intense work, and social cooperation have a make-it-or-break-it kind of urgency. The willingness to force kids to maintain educational footholds in multiple languages and cultures is evidence of distrust in Korea?s educational system, of recognition that schooling is about cultural and social indoctrination as well as facts and skills, and of a sense that success (individually and culturally) in the next few decades will depend on the ability to forge international ties and to move back and forth between countries, cultures, and languages.

The sense I get from the parents I talk to is that they consider the education they provide for their children as the primary factor in the children?s future success or failure. They tell me stories about Korea?s historical domination by China, Japan, and the U.S. and how Korea doesn?t have any natural resources, so people are its only resource. A palpable consciousness of Korea?s place in the global order and the connection between individual and national fortune structure these stories and inform the seriousness with which they are told.

We are moving in an opposite direction from most of the families I know. They are spending a few years in the U.S./Canada/Australia and returning to Korea, instead of leaving the U.S. to spend some time in Asia. I can?t say for sure how people perceive us except to say for certain that they envy the ability to move with such freedom and to have such a good grasp of English. Our motivations in the beginning were more personal than educational; my husband and I wanted to make sure the kids could speak their grandparents? languages, both literally and figuratively. Having grown up with something of an inferiority complex about being Asian, it was important to me that my kids spend some time in a place where everybody else is Asian. But that world no longer exists; the world in which my kids are growing up is a world in which the ability to speak and move across borders is an asset. Here, the decline of the U.S. (or ?the rise of everywhere else?) is just a self-evident fact; the longer I spend in this place the more I see our efforts to educate the kids on two continents as the only logical way to prepare them for adult lives and good jobs.

And from David Orr:

Be sure to check out the comments section for a lot of other funny poems.

But let's pause and think a little about the hatred of “elites” which seems to be the Republican Party's main stock in trade at the moment.

The advantage of this easily exploitable resentment toward “elites” is that it is widespread and amorphous, not subject to party divisions. Unionized hourly-wage workers as well as comfortably retired denizens of Santa Barbara are apt to respond viscerally to the idea that there are some snooty people in control of things “who think they're better than you are” and don't deserve their good fortune. It is a somewhat more anonymous and abstract version of the resentment against minorities, women and immigrants, whom numerous people, again without regard to party affiliation, are apt to accuse of grabbing more than their fair share. Every individual in this country is apt to say, “I work hard, I play by the rules, I am a paragon of decency and I don't get my just reward.” They would probably say it whether our national reward-system were the most egalitarian or the most inegalitarian on earth. Maybe it's human nature.

But between a deep-seated sense that one deserves a little more than one has been getting and the anger that causes people to do stupid things, there is a missing act or two, and the political strategists of the GOP (mainly) are to blame for putting the match to the wet firewood.

A few days ago, the papers were making it sound as if ideology-- free-market fundamentalism-- were the explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible sabotaging of a rescue plan by the Republicans in the House. I think that would be to give them and ideology too much credit. They are doing what they think they need to do to get re-elected, and letting their responses be dictated by the volume of angry phone calls coming into their office. As the NYT reports, a few days ago the calls were saying “Bail those crooks out? Hell no!” Now they are saying “Why did you let the market crash and splatter my nest egg?” I don't think any of us is suffering from an irony-poor diet, but if it's worth anything, I'll point out that these Republicans are also the people who like to pose as being immune to polls and focus groups, the “stay the course” team.

Are you for Main Street or are you for Wall Street? False alternative, because if Wall Street collapses, Main Street will be left selling apples and pencils. It's too bad that we let Wall Street get into such shape, but too late, too. Here is a case where the apparent clarity of alternatives, beloved of pollsters and talking-points-memo-artists alike, simply turns things to hash.

In a society made up of more than a few thousand people, some operations are going to have to be handed over to specialists, the people who tan hides or grind flour or survey land. These people may be marked off as separate from the social body-- as beneficent or malevolent, wizards or witches, but in any case different and not to be taken lightly: an example is the status of wandering ironsmiths in feudal West Africa. Sometimes these specialists are imagined to be blood-suckers clinging to the vital mass of good ordinary people; sometimes they are looked on with a gentler envy. Think of the miller's daughter in so many fairy tales: the miller being the man who, just because he runs a complex industrial operation, “gets something for nothing” by extracting his cut from every load of corn delivered to the mill.

Closer to home (to my faculty office at St. Eli's, anyway, where I am typing these lines) is the role of education and meritocracy in mediating between the just-plain-folks and the mysterious elites. Yeah, of course you already knew that between the Yale C student who rode to the top on his family fortune and the Harvard Law Review editor with dark skin and a funny name, the real “elitism” issue has to do with getting the biggest results for the least hard work. You probably agree, too, that a society with a good ladder of social ascent is healthier than one without it. There have to be ways of discovering and rewarding talent, which helps to achieve social stability and to recruit some quick brains for dealing with whatever crises need to be resolved. It is good that we have the world's best universities and good that they don't base their admissions policy on family connections. Enter now a paradox of information-sated society: when everybody can be a “day trader” in all kinds of obscure and specialized knowledge, the traditional holders of that knowledge begin to look as if their authority is merely socially propped up, circumstantial, undemocratic. It's not actually true (you can't assemble functioning expertise in medicine, petroleum geology or art history from Wikipedia, though you might get up to cocktail-party level with the buzzwords) but there is a consequence to the illusion, to the sense that “I'm just as good as you.”

Formerly the language that applied to such views was “Yes, in the eyes of God, but not in the eyes of the state medical bureau, the stock market, etc.” We live in an age when the vocabulary of “the kingdom not of this world” isn't available to a lot of us (hello there, Dick Rorty), and a lot of the rest of us are impatient to institute the rewards and punishments promised by the Almighty right away, with sharia or whatever they call it up in Wasilla. So the appeal to an eventual, fullness-of-time resolution-- that opium of the people-- doesn't bring us the same mellow buzz as before, and people want their vengeance now. They want the bell to toll for thee. And fast. Even if, as John Donne predicted, and as Daffy Duck discovered, there's a little pronoun trouble in the offing.

Anyway, maybe the bailout can be bailed out before all our chocolate bunnies are revealed to be hollow.

My baby won't use a lot of big words to try to confuse you. He doesn't know any words yet. But he has a good heart.

My baby won't cut and run in Iraq. He can't even crawl yet.

You'll know where my baby stands on any given issue: wherever I left him, because, as previously mentioned, he can't crawl away . . .

But my baby also understands the need for change. He cries out to be changed, several times a day.

My baby fights terrorism by shopping, mostly because he keeps outgrowing his clothes. Actually, he has his shoppers do it for him, which means he's also providing jobs to American workers, something the elitists who don't have personal shoppers wouldn't understand.

My baby is not prejudiced: he does not see color. (Full disclosure: he is starting to see in color, and is getting much better at coordinating both eyes to get a sense of three-dimensional space. But on the plus side, his judgments are still based on a black and white, two-dimensional picture of the world).

My baby is no Washington insider: he's never been out of the town he was born in. He doesn't have a passport. Hell, he doesn't even have a social security card, that's how independent of big government bureaucracy he is.

My baby likes to surround himself with grownups who can make the hard decisions for him. That's his leadership style.

My baby always goes with his gut, so when he smiles at you, you'll know he means it. Either that, or he's got gas.

Witness this Chronicle piece about the “skimming” quality of reading done online, versus the deep immersion said to be characteristic of book reading. The flaw: it sets up the distinction but doesn't offer an explanatory mechanism. Here's my theory. People treat web pages as environments, looking this way and that for fodder and threats. But the model for reading a book is conversation (or, if you're a bit psycho, internal monologue). The twist is that from the beginning online literacy was trumpeted as an environment, an experience, a space, and that was supposed to be an improvement over the flat, linear world of reading.

Now environments typically exist for their denizens only as constellations of data points with some relevance for survival. When is the last time you took in every detail of a map? I wager you never did: if you're like me, you locate the point you're at now, the place you're trying to get to, and the turns along the way, and leave the millions of other potential data constellations unconsidered. (On the characteristics of human orientation in space, see Barbara Tversky's studies of movement and mapping.)

A little like fundamentalist Christians reading their Bible, if I may be so bold: they're uninterested in the book itself, in what it has to say, in its history, its imagination, even its morals, but pick up on the bits that the conventions of their discourse community identify as answers to the question, “What do I have to do to be saved?” Almost all the good stuff, to my way of accounting, falls by the wayside in the orienteering style of reading. Or imagine a student, the night before the test, opening The Waves or Totality and Infinity for the first time and trying to get out of it answers to the question, “How can I get out of this with better than a C-minus?”

Skimming is described in the Chronicle piece as a “lesser” kind of reading. No, ask your friendly neighborhood phenomenologist: it's a different kind of act with different interests. One of the great turnings in human history came when people took a deep breath and looked around them for something other than quarry or predators. Enter aesthetics, philosophy, mistletoe, etc. I call that progress. It might even be the origin of culture, the specifically human (as opposed to the biological) traits of our species. But from the standpoint of pure survival and reproduction, it's epiphenomenal.

The glance-and-dash style is not something new, some dysfunction or ADD brought into the world by the sinister Pixel Trust, but a part of human equipment from millennia back. It has to do with the way people size up environments and act in them. The rules for conversing with a friend, or with a stranger treated as a potential ally, are different. People who size up other people and use them as environmental resources quickly lose the trust of those around them. They rub our ethical fur the wrong way. If, as I'm guessing, the behavioral pattern for engaging with a book (most conspicuously a work of persuasion or fiction) is the friendly conversation, maybe this is a pattern people need to re-learn, but they won't do it until a reward system makes it interesting for them.

In other words, people might rediscover the social.

I?m finding I like this way of keeping tabs even though I don?t quite understand its colors and rhythms the way I might have five years ago. I don?t get, for instance, the frenzied adoration of Obama — the (as H Saussy put it) ?messianic? hopes invested in him. Is that because I?ve never heard him speak? Or because, as E Hayot put it, ?I worry that I'm going to be too hopeful, that he won't be able to fulfill all my dreams and plans for what his administration might be like, rainbow bridges to the future and all.?

There?s a category of inquiry here about the ways in which people people acquire their less conscious or rational opinions of candidates; as Walter Shapiro notes, compared to the last election, ?The media environment is, of course, vastly different because of everything from YouTube and text messaging to the often-ignored reality that roughly 20 percent of the voters do not watch any TV commercials because of TiVo and other recording devices.?

My internet connection is slow, I tell people, that is why I don?t listen to the speeches. But I do have the patience to wait for comedy clips of Jon Stewart or Triumph the Insult Dog. The truth is I can?t stand the suspense of listening to the candidates. It is, for me, the way E Hayot described watching/listening to Lauren Caitlin or Larry Craig. (I also have trouble with scary movies and American Idol.)

So I am an absentee voter, and to some extent I fight to maintain that distance.

... but will have to come back to these notes later, after I throw out all the dairy products.

* * * *
Sorry for the delay. I was thinking that part of me feels more comfortable being an absentee voter because news from the homeland is increasingly grim. The economy is a disaster (and we feel it here too — the exchange rate determines my grocery budget), Palin is lauded for being sexy and ?putting a skirt on,? identity politics has come to mean voting for someone who is non-threatening and mediocre ?like me,? campaign lies carry more weight than the truth, and no one even seems to care about taking Bush to task for the lying, the torture, the economy, etc. (because he?s a guy with whom you might want to watch a football game). From the outside looking in, the decline of the U.S. in every measure (cultural, economic, political, educational) feels real and perceptible, in proportion to the very visceral sensation that this (China, Korea) is the place to be, the place on the rise, the site of an ongoing resurrection. The decline of the U.S. and the rise of everywhere else are inseparable, and govern my not only perception of this election but also my feelings about going back to the U.S.

We chose to live abroad but it was always meant to be temporary. However, the longer I stay the more reluctant I feel about going back. Perhaps I am overly influenced by listening to Korean parents? rationales for sending their kids abroad to be educated, but I feel better putting my eggs in several baskets, giving my children exposure to several languages and cultures as much as I can without making them crazy. When they are fighting for jobs, food, and water in twenty or thirty years maybe they will think of me and be thankful.

During my break from this piece I monitored the ex-pat email lists for updates on the milk scare. (We?re throwing away snickers bars and M&Ms now too — the ones made in China. And it now seems like the government knew about the tainted milk much earlier but covered it up because of the Olympics.) A common sentiment was, ?We are furious, why aren?t more locals angry about this?? I asked my Chinese teacher this morning, who shrugged and said, ?They are angry, but they know they can?t do anything about it.?

Why aren?t we more angry about what has happened to our country in the past eight years? Where?s the rage? Is it because we feel that there?s nothing we can do? That, as E Hayot might say, micro-level and macro-level responsibility have become so disassociated that the only way to avoid feeling completely nihilistic is to remove oneself from feeling anything at all (E?s ?twilight stasis?)?

Reading H Saussy?s post about skype and twitter as well as this piece about the ?googlization of our lives" I also wondered what role steady streams of information play (if any). Information is ranked by popularity and we consume information, like the latest products and brands, for the pleasure of consumption, not just to gather information for action. It is more pleasurable to look at a picture of Palin in a skirt and imagine that she is like me then to spend time parsing the particulars of Obama?s tax plans. I monitor my friends? lives on facebook and I want to feel that level of intimacy with my country?s representative, ignoring for the moment that the president should do something more than resemble me and understand my interests.

By the way, it isn't too late to request an absentee ballot. Request your absentee ballot, if you haven't already, through The Overseas Vote Foundation.

As Clive Thompson discovers when he gets into the bathyscaphe and spends time with the “ambient awareness media,” you don't really absorb it, you sort of let it drift past. The hundreds of mini-posts about trivial doings just keep you tethered to the school of fish or the flock of geese that is generally going this way or that, depending on the season and guided by the magnetic fields.

If, that is, you and the other twitterers are part of the same flock.

The mom who discovered, back in February, that her daughters didn't want to Twitter with her-- their excuses are notably lame, and I feel for you, ma'am-- learned how a flock counts its own. For the girls, being in the same info-cloud with her amounted to surveillance. If their twenty best friends had been on the network first, they would have jumped at the chance to message the world about their incidental doings. But a mom who joins your cloud-- that's like noticing that the goose next to you in the formation is wearing plaid and an orange cap, and has a funny metal tube under his wing.

(-- to be continued: I just got a skype call, which is part of my topic today!)...

That was a nice call. It lasted a bit over an hour, I could see my friend, and if you have Skype, you know how much it cost me. Nuthin'. I woke up today thinking about how much the last few years of innovation in electronic devices have done for the Long Distance Relationship, that hazard of a mobile society.

I've lived through some LDRs. That was back in the 1980s, when long-distance phone calls were expensive, my budget was pinched, and a letter (the preferred form of communication among aspirant eaters of Brie) took five days or a week to arrive. In general, the LDR was a faltering, doomed sort of thing. How could it not be, when a proper cycle of back-and-forth took ten days to get through, and the phone conversations that became necessary to patch up the inevitable rifts were always time-lagged in relation to the other person's response? It was an ongoing game of catch-up ball, unless the other person was extremely placid. LDRs don't make for placid people, that's my experience.

But now, although my sweetie is eight or nine time zones away, I can look at her and have a regular conversation whenever we both have our computers turned on. Our heads look like swollen pancakes with square blobs of a slightly different color swimming in them, but at least there's the chance to gesture, smile, add an expression to the words.

And even without the skyping, I can send her an IM of a few words with a reflection or a question at any moment of the day. Staying in touch, instant gratification. Delightful.

It's probably generational, but this is enough cloud for me. I don't want to have ambient awareness of 300 people, but I do like to be able to pull my one object of fascination aside and say “what did you think about...”?

It makes it immensely easier, though the shortcomings, too, are infinite. But for now I am cheered up rather than complaining. It all makes “being together” much less of a yes/no option. And it throws into stark relief the cases of “being together” with others that were not enlivened by conversation, which had the same logical effect, but in a less cheerful way.