Saturday, August 8, 2009

English teachers not the Korean media's only whipping boy

Roboseyo wrote:
English teachers are not Korea's only whipping boys and girls. At other times, the Korean media scapegoats lawyers, lawmakers, chaebol owners, private academies, the political left, the political right, the politicized church, the rich and arrogant, the poor and angry, Japan, and everything associated with Japan, and America, and everything associated with America, have all been tapped as the source of what ails Korea, too. We English teachers actually get a pretty small slice of the blame-shifting pie, in the grand scheme of things.
Excellent point! I wish I'd written that myself. Oh, wait. I did:
I don’t want people to mistake what I’m about to say as saying this kind of thing is okay, but the fact is that the Korean media has lots of whipping boys, depending on which media outlet and which agenda is being promoted. There’s the rich, the government, corporations, wild twenty-something libertines, wild married swingers, arrogant overseas Koreans, ugly Koreans abroad, parents who have hagwon employees raise their children, errant teachers, etc., etc.

These folks, and E2 English teachers as a group, are only one of many stars in the Korean media muckraker’s constellation.
Plus:
In fact, the agenda-driven elements of the Korean media have a herd of scapegoats it regularly brings out for slaughter, including the groups I mentioned above. This type of reporting is only a few pixels of a big picture that represents a much wider problem.
And you thought only Koreans plagiarized.

Winky winky to Roboseyo, who despite being devoid of original thought, is probably a nice guy. (Again, winky winky)

UPDATE:
I apparently have insulted Roboseyo, who says he doesn't buy "winky winky" as a license to do this bit of ribbing:
oh and one more thing: winky or no winky, it's still insulting; there are a dozen politer ways to have drawn attention to this.
In fact, my primary purpose was to highlight this point that I had made on a different blog, and with which Roboseyo seemed to agree, as part of an effort I've been making lately to migrate points I made elsewhere over to here. Seriously, sorry for any offense, Roboseyo, as I really didn't mean any; I thought the title of the post would sufficiently show the point of the post.

And kudos to PartyPooper who, despite his apparent amused disdain for me, appears to be a regular reader of my blog and reports my movements (as well as what he thinks are my movements) to anyone reading what he writes. And I was not aware that a little ribbing = pissing one's pants, so thanks for that bit of info. 

5 comments:

  1. Breathe in.. breathe out...

    will you relax? =)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, you did, didn't you?

    Half my commenters are drunk when they hit PUBLISH, so whatever trailing punctuation they have is usually random key hits and I've become acclimated to ignoring it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I believe for most of these ppl (English students) it's the first time they have been a minority. It's a sobering and powerless feeling and they are not quite able to handle it in a more mature manner.

    What I will also say is that expats are use to a certain amount of personal rights given that most came from modern democratic countries. However, they have the least amount of ability to exercise that right given their alien status and lack of Korean language skills.

    ReplyDelete

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