1. EDUCATION 5TUESDAY DECEMBER 11, 2012
By Oh Kyu-wook
More than 23,000 North Koreans
have resettled in South Korea since
the Korean War ended in 1953. But
many young defectors still find it
hard to adjust to the differences due
in part to the lack of a proper educa-
tion.
The number
of teen defectors
exceeded 1,600
last year, up from
421 in 2005. But the dropout rate
among them stands at nearly 5 per-
cent, more than twice the overall
rate, according to a report from the
Ministry of Education, Science and
Technology.
“The problem is most dropout
students come from broken families,
and don’t have the ability to move
ahead in their lives financially,” said
Lee Hung-hoon, principal of Yeo-
myung School, in an interview with
The Korea Herald.
“But that’s why our school is
here,” the 54-year-old principal said.
Founded in 2004 with support
from a group of local churches, Yeo-
myung is one of only a few alter-
native high schools in the country
where the once-failed-defectors can
resume their studies.
“There are around 12 alternative
schools for North Korean defectors.
But we’re the only school with full
accreditation from the Education
Ministry, and they can only acquire
a high-school diploma here,” he add-
ed.
Located at the foot of Namsan in
central Seoul, the school is only a
single three-story building with four
classrooms, without even a play-
ground or facilities for outside activi-
ties.
“We are a small school with only
60 students at the moment,” the
principal said.
But for students attending the
small alternative institution, this
is a “last ditch” effort to overcome
cultural and educational gaps and to
survive in this competitive society,
he added.
Students at Yeomyung, he said,
cited the inability to adjust to a dif-
ferent culture and family issues as
their main reasons for dropping out
of public schools in South Korea.
“Most of the defectors didn’t have
a proper primary education, and
missed the crucial time of studying.
And they still don’t get enough sup-
port from parents here. For instance,
we have only 10 students with both
parents, and for most of the rest,
either their fathers or mothers still
live in the North,” he said.
“For them, finances are a major
barrier to completing their educa-
tion.”
The principal, however, noted that
by attending the Yeomyung School
that barrier can be at least lowered.
The school covers all tuition fees
and textbook costs as well as three
meals a day. Also students from
other cities can stay in the school’s
dormitory.
The alternative school’s curricu-
lum is similar to that of other public
high schools here — except that the
students must also attend a special
class designed to help them adjust to
South Korean society.
“They learn simple things, such
as how to open a bank account, and
things like you probably learned
when you were a child. But the de-
fectors often say that they suffered
because of hunger in the North, and
now they suffer from their lack of
knowledge here,” Lee said.
But the problem, he said, is that
the school can accept only a limited
number of students due to limited
finances.
“I have to admit that it’s quite dif-
ficult to get by. Although we have
some financial support from church-
es, it’s not enough, so I have to go out
and find donations from people all
over the country,” the principal said.
Before joining the Yeomyung
School in March this year, he
worked for many years with E.Land
Group, Korea’s leading fashion re-
tailer, and also served as the head
of the company’s branch offices in
Europe and China.
But he left the business and be-
came a pastor in 2009, and over the
years his enthusiasm for alternative
education flourished, a passion that
has led to his latest occupation.
“It’s quite hard, but I have a great
passion for my role,” he said.
Most local principals are focused
on sending more students to top
elite colleges, but for Lee, it is get-
ting more students to graduate.
“Many students have a part-
time job to send the money to their
families remaining in North Korea
through brokers. They often miss
class and sometimes never return to
the school,” he said.
The principal said it is important
to have these young defectors get
a proper education. He pointed out
that the dropout defectors are espe-
cially vulnerable to crime because
they start from scratch in the South.
“I always tell my students that
you should never give up on your-
self, because education is the only
way you could overcome prejudice
and social discrimination in this so-
ciety,” he said.
Lee insists that for the next two
to three years he will work on
strengthening and deepening the al-
ternative school model.
“We’re planning to install two
new classrooms, and hopefully will
be able to move to a larger space,
where we can have a playground.”
He is quite clear on his stance
that the stand-alone alternative
school has to build in South Korea.
“I hope that when our country is
finally reunified, this school will be
a great education role model,” he
added.
(596story@heraldcorp.com)
By Eric Enlow
The promise and problems attend-
ing legal education are old. In 450 B.C.,
the Roman commoners, the “plebes,”
forced the elite patricians to make
the laws publically available for the
first time, posting them on 12 bronze
tables so everyone
could learn and
assert their rights.
According to the
greatest Roman republican lawyer,
Marcus Tullius Cicero, they were
written in an easy metrical form so
that children were taught to sing the
Twelve Tables, the “carmen necessar-
ium,” as part of their basic education.
By 50 B.C., however, Cicero la-
mented that the old way of universal
childhood legal education had ceased.
Modern law, he complained, even if
necessarily grown more copious and
complicated than children could sing,
was again hidden from the plebes
and known only to those who com-
pleted arduous private studies.
Tully urged new methods of legal
education drawing the laws into a
more intelligible, manageable order.
Even as the Roman Republic fell
into civil war and imperial tyranny,
he urged the rising generation to a
refreshed legal, oratorical training so
that the law could be liberated from
its crabbed, inexpressible forms and
its justice offered more appealingly
and universally to the public again.
Although the Ciceronian plan to safe-
guard liberty through legal education
failed in his own age, his writings on
law energized the love of the rule of
law from Renaissance Italy, where
they were rediscovered, to the early
American Republic — where Cicero’s
legally driven anti-imperialism was
explicitly emulated.
We still struggle, however, with the
basic Ciceronian problematic: if the
rule of law is to support the rights
of the people, then legal education
needs to be accessible to the people.
If social development requires more
complicated law than all people can
learn, we still hold to the Ciceronian
promise that improved legal train-
ing will open the law to all, at least
through well-trained intermediaries,
and increase the real freedom of the
people.
As is true around the world today,
the transplanted legal forms and ed-
ucational methods of foreign nations
were critical in the development of
Roman legal education. The Roman
drafters of the Twelve Tables, the De-
cemviri, traveled to find model laws
among the Greeks, who themselves
had been inspired by the Phoenicians
and Persians, whose own influences
we can still read in the laws of the
ancient Babylonians and Israelites.
Unsurprisingly, 400 years after the
Decemviri, Cicero returned again to
study among the Greeks, whose novel
legal classifications and oratorical
models he imported back to Rome.
Like the Decemviri and Cicero, the
nations of Western Europe made
their first great reforms of legal edu-
cation in the 12th century by intro-
ducing university study, not of their
own national laws, but of the laws of
the Byzantium, as codified by Justin-
ian in the sixth century.
Modern Western legal education
was profoundly influenced from even
further afield by contact in the 18th
century with the Chinese civil exami-
nation system, as Teng Ssu-yü traced
out in his classic article, Chinese In-
fluence on the Western Examination
System (1943). Prior to contact with
China, written examinations were
unknown in the West and the legal
profession was open only to men of
upper classes through personal con-
tacts and apprenticeships. Apprecia-
tion for the Chinese system brought
the first systems of public examina-
tion in France and England in the
late 18th and 19th centuries. The
ultimate success of the civil examina-
tion systems in Europe and then the
U.S., inspired by the objectivity of
the Chinese imperial system, led by
measures to the uniform written ex-
aminations of contemporary Western
legal systems.
Today, the problems and promise
of legal education remain analogous
to those faced historically by Cicero,
though much intensified. As the glo-
bal commitment to democracy and
the rule of law has increased, the
increased complexity of modern law
with its concomitant public obscurity
poses greater challenges. The promise
of legal education to meet these prob-
lems has grown in importance. On
the other hand, today, there is also
an unprecedented communication
between legal systems and a neces-
sity for international cooperation in
areas such as trade, environmental
and human-rights law. This means
that the resources available to legal
education to solve these problems
have also increased. If the Decemviri
and European nations once turned
abroad for models of legal improve-
ment, today legal educators have far
more access to comparative material
and motivation to expose their stu-
dents to the successes and models
for legal improvement found in other
countries. If history is a guide, then
we can take some comfort in the
growing resources contemporary legal
education possesses to face its grow-
ing challenges.
The writer is the dean of Handong
International Law School at Handong
Global University in Pohang, North
Gyeongsang Province. ― Ed.
The constant promise and
problems of legal education
Alternative school helps young N.K. defectors adapt
Head of Yeomyung School
aims to create a role
model after reunification
North Korean defectors attend a class at Yeomyung School in central Seoul. Chung Hee-cho/The Korea Herald
Eric Enlow
Lee Hung-hoon, principal of
Yeomyung School
HERALD
INTERVIEW
EDUCATION
COLUMN