TIGER ASIANS: HOW THE EDUCATION STANDARDS IN ASIA ARE BOTH A SOURCE OF PRIDE AND A CAUSE OF CONCERN
TIGER ASIANS: HOW THE EDUCATION STANDARDS IN ASIA ARE BOTH A SOURCE OF PRIDE AND A CAUSE OF CONCERN
A Research Paper presented by: Kim Ortiz, Ateneo de Manila University
November 23, 2011.
Outside, he hears the sound of sirens and neighbors gathering. In the few minutes that the police had been there, his house had gone from being a normal home in Gwangjin, South Korea to a serious crime scene. Why he ever thought he could keep it hidden, he didn’t really know. He begins to wonder why he committed the crime in the first place when he knew that it would only make him a murderer. Regret starts to take over him, but then he suddenly remembers how terrifying she had been that night and tells himself that he had only killed her out of self-defense. It wasn’t unusual for her to scold and punish him whenever he didn’t get the best results; there were nights when she would even keep him from eating and sleeping, but out of all of those nights, that one had been the worst.
He had placed 4,000th out of 700,000 in a nationwide mock college entrance exam – a feat that any parent should already be proud of; but, he felt that it was a number that still wouldn’t satisfy her, so he tampered with the score card and made his rank read 62. But even with such an impressive score, it still wasn’t enough for her. That night, she scolded him, took a baseball bat and a golf club, and brutally beat him. Frightened that she would find out about how he had forged his score the next day when she’d visit his school, he did the only thing he could think of at that moment – he grabbed a knife, went for her, and stabbed his own mother in the neck. Back then, killing her had only seemed like a simple solution to his problems. Unfortunately, he had not anticipated that doing so would only put him in an even bigger predicament.
He hears the police shout his name from outside and yet again, he feels trapped. This time, there doesn’t seem to be a “simple solution” anymore and it makes him wonder if he ever actually had a chance of being free. They break down the door. He listens as a herd of men enters the house and move from room to room. In one, they find the missing woman’s body, stained with blood that had dried in the eight months that she had been kept there. In another, they finally find the boy, the expression on his face unfathomable.
At 18 years old, the boy had become a murderer. At 18 years old, the boy had already taken both his mother’s life and his own all because he had not scored high enough in an exam. (InterAksyonTV5)
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