What Stayed With Me From South Korea’s Classics-Reading Boom

Lee Ji-seong’s Lead by Reading came out in 2010 and helped bring the idea of reading the classics into public discussion in South Korea. Its success also drew new readers to some of his earlier books.

He published several other works of personal development. This is the one I associate with the moment when the humanities seemed to be entering conversations about everything from education to getting a job.

The reading list that drew objections

The book’s reading programme drew criticism. Some of the texts were so demanding that the list could feel designed for readers who already had more time and training than most students.

Lee suggests Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for teenagers, draws on the history of science in discussing finance and encourages reading original-language texts. I could see why readers questioned how much of that they could put into practice.

When the humanities were a hiring topic

The book also had an audience ready to listen. In the early 2010s, employers in South Korea were talking about applicants who could show a grounding in the humanities.

I was finishing my degree and trying to get a job at the same time. When an employer said they wanted someone with a humanities background, I wanted to know what that would look like in an interview.

The talk I attended in 2011

I heard Lee speak at a Readers’ Concert at Sungkyunkwan University on September 5, 2011.

I knew little about his work at the time. I kept a few notes and picked up Lead by Reading afterward.

Who gets time to read the classics?

Lee wants people to read, think and return to the classics. He treats such reading as a practice that shaped many of the people whose work he admires.

He makes broad comparisons between public and private schooling in the United States and between education in the United States and South Korea. I was more interested in the concrete question underneath them: who gets enough time and support to work through a difficult text?

Robert Maynard Hutchins and Chicago

Lee cites the University of Chicago, where Robert Maynard Hutchins became president in 1929 and helped reshape undergraduate education.

The book associates those changes with the university’s Nobel laureates. The history of the reforms is interesting in itself. Counting prizes cannot isolate what the curriculum did for any individual student.

The book’s account of mass schooling

Lee traces a form of mass schooling back to Prussia and emphasizes preparation for military and industrial life. I read that as the argument he uses to introduce another idea about education. The histories of modern school systems are wider than that one origin story.

Learning with Karl Witte

The example he offers is Karl Witte, a German father who studied earlier writing on education, including works associated with Plato, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau and Pestalozzi, before deciding how to teach his child.

In Lee’s account, Witte made books central and tried to make the work something the child could enjoy. Three ideas stand out.

1. Give play a place in learning.
2. Make encouragement part of the work.
3. Teach in a spirit of reverence for God.

One story has Witte inviting the child’s friends to celebrate when he finished a difficult book. I liked that reading something hard could become an occasion to share.

Five ways to work through a text

Lee proposes several ways to read a demanding text.

1. Read the whole work through.
2. Return for a close reading.
3. Copy passages by hand.
4. Work out what you think.
5. Discuss the work with someone who has studied it.

Leave some time to think

Near the end, Lee asks why a person can remember a great deal of a book and still find that little has changed. He thinks the missing part may be the time to reflect.

A line from the Analects makes the point familiar.

• Study without reflection can leave a person lost, and reflection without study carries its own danger.

It matters what a reader has a chance to do with what they have learned.

Lee invokes Korean thinkers including Jeong Yak-yong and Yi I, known by the pen name Yulgok. I took two ideas from Yulgok’s self-admonitions.

• Reading is there to help you act well when something needs doing.
• Learning lasts a lifetime, so there is little point in racing through it or letting it stop.

Shakespeare and a Korean television joke

This comparison is mine. Thinking about the classics made me remember a routine from the Korean television show Gag Concert.

• What happens if you get the job? You earn money. What happens if you earn money? You feel good and buy beef. What happens if you buy beef?

The joke kept moving by turning each answer into the next question. It became a line people repeated well beyond the show.

I had seen something like the same pattern in Rosalind’s account of a courtship in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

• The two meet and immediately look at one another.
• The look leads straight to love.
• Love produces a sigh, and the sigh sends them looking for its cause.
• Once they know the cause, they are already looking for a remedy.

The rhetorical term anadiplosis describes carrying the end of one phrase into the beginning of the next. Repeating the structure can also make the lines gather speed.

I have no idea whether the comedians knew that scene. I enjoyed recognizing a device in a centuries-old play that still did something similar when people heard it on television.

That was a good reason to have read the play. It gave me another way to listen to a joke I already knew.

I would choose a different reading list for myself. The book is most persuasive when it asks readers to spend enough time with a work to think something through.

Reading has also been a way for me to recover from a difficult day or find language for something I had been trying to understand.

The title does one more thing I like. In English, “lead” and “reading” produce a near echo, and the Korean title makes the relationship between the two even more audible. It gives the argument a phrase people can remember.

Book details

Lead by Reading

Author

Lee Ji-seong

Korean edition reviewed

April 5, 2016

ISBN-13

9791185035444

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