“If you work hard, you can do anything” industrial high schoolers··· Why do they blame themselves for failure - 경향신문
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As graduation approached in February 2021, third-year students at a specialized high school gathered by a school wall holding papers on which they had written their own career paths. /Kang Yoon-jung
What images come to mind about “industrial high school boys”? The notion of “kids who are bad at studying” is common, though it can feel awkward to say aloud. If you are interested in labor issues, you may recall news reports on the deaths of on-the-job trainees. If you are sensitive to generational or gender issues, you might associate them with men in their twenties or misogyny. Is it yet another prejudice to suspect that most people who conjure such images have, in fact, never met an industrial high school boy in person?
Sociology researcher and activist with the civic group Transparent Bag Strap, which has criticized credentialism, Yeon Hye-won, wrote this: “The group of male adolescents seems to be the most popular subject among statisticians. Yet I have never met a statistician who has actually had a conversation with them.” From 2016 to 2017, Yeon interviewed 30 male students at 10 industrial high schools across the country. Most were born from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. They grew up as the neoliberal order took root across society after the 1997 foreign exchange crisis, and they were educated under the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations.
From conversations with industrial high school boys, Yeon draws several keywords. The most important is “meritocracy.” The author sees meritocracy not as starting from the same place and accepting the results of competition, but as “a way of making already differential placements look like the result of individual effort and responsibility.” “Ability” differs according to a household’s economic resources, parents’ education, and access to information, yet students believe “everything in the world is fair” and “if you work hard, you can do anything.” If they believe effort leads to achievement, then failure to achieve means a lack of effort. This belief leads to acquiescence to the label of “academic underachiever.” The problem is that meritocracy “eliminates even empathy for those who have failed.” Under the meritocratic worldview of industrial high school students, even a tragic industrial disaster like the Guui Station accident is accepted as “an accident that just happens once in a while” or “the fault of an individual’s carelessness.”
Another immediate issue for industrial high school boys is military service. In South Korea, men become subject to conscription when they turn 19. Unless they defer through college enrollment and the like, enlistment becomes a near-term concern. The author argues that “industrial high schools were, from the outset, part of a state project to simultaneously produce ‘workers’ and ‘troops’.” In their regular, closed, hierarchical routines and spaces, and in the embodiment of emotions and language that conform to order, industrial high schools resemble the military. For these students, the military “is an object of discontent, yet at the same time a device that defers the feeling of having been abandoned by society.” For industrial high schoolers who do not possess symbolic capital such as educational pedigree, assets, or networks, military service is “an affective asset that most reliably yields social recognition.”
Nearly every industrial high school boy the author met cited “games” as a key topic of conversation. They play games, watch gameplay videos, or talk about games in online communities. Games are “the only social stage on which teenagers who are in positions hard to gain recognition through grades or job competition can reveal themselves and be acknowledged.” Online spaces that have grown around games are “the last bastion of masculinity.” After the disintegration of the heterosexual normative family and the male breadwinner model, the online realm has remained the only space that can provide a past form of male identity. One student cited the shutdown policy as the “news most influential in life.” The shutdown policy was the first government measure to restrict games, which are the most important means for teenagers to sustain relationships. The fact that the ministry in charge at the time was the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family helps explain the sustained resentment male adolescents feel toward this ministry.
Graduates of specialized high schools. /Kang Yoon-jung
Last winter, a Kyunghyang Shinmun reporter met third-year students at a specialized high school in Seoul as they worked in a training room. These students said that, because hiring had become difficult amid an economic downturn, they were exploring other paths such as further study. Kim Song-yi
They were thoroughly indifferent to politics. When asked about politics, students answered along the lines of “there is nothing to use it for” and “whatever. They will handle it themselves.” What is notable are remarks such as “I do not think anything I say helps at all” and “there is nothing about myself to overrate. Nothing to brag about.” The feeling of doing poorly at school connects to a feeling that their political and social views are useless. Because instruction that is seen as unrelated to employment is scarcely provided at industrial high schools, interest in politics is not fostered. Some only belatedly realize, as they encounter realities outside school during the job search, that politics affects their lives.
Industrial high schools once drew attention. In the 1970s, they were newly established all over the country, during the Park Chung-hee era that focused on growth through a “technology-first nation” approach. Skilled workers who performed well at the Skills Olympics paraded through city streets. Graduates became labor immediately needed in capital-intensive industries such as heavy and chemical industries. The problem is that from the mid-1980s the industrial structure was reorganized around high-tech sectors. Korean companies now wanted technical and research personnel with college degrees or higher, not skilled workers. “When the state needed workers, industrial high schools expanded; when the state no longer needed workers, industrial high schools became stigmatized spaces.”
The author argues that industrial high schools have cultivated “labor power,” not “workers.” “Male members of the working class who cannot understand themselves as workers experience their anxiety and deprivation not as a class issue but as a crisis of masculinity.” In industrial high schools, boys “exist only in ‘prescribed ways’ through an identity chain of engineersoldiergamerconsumer.”
Yeon writes that this book is “less a book about industrial high schools than about how workers failed to become citizens.” It is a volume woven from several papers written over a decade of holding onto this question. While it contains “a critique of the school education system that grants exclusive authority to academic language,” the author is aware of the irony that this critique, too, can only be carried out in academic language. In the end, “the place of the body that language cannot represent” extends beyond the book, which suggests why the author is both a researcher and an activist.
