A recommended book, and a song that still cuts

In a class on the introduction to social education, a professor recommended E. Reimer’s School is Dead — the English title is left as the notes print it, typographical spacing and all in the source, and here simply as School is Dead. While reading, the writer was reminded, they say, of Seo Taiji and Boys’ older song Classroom Idea. The song is old, they write, and yet, heard again, it does not feel merely classical; the criticism is still strong. The schools the song laid bare seem little advanced from what they were, and, looked at another way, the writer thinks they may have grown worse.

The song, as they recall it, speaks of children packed into a small classroom early in the morning, of the same things being put into many heads, of youth spent in a closed, dark room, and of university as wrapping paper that makes a person look more expensive than the student sitting beside them. They do not copy the lyrics out at length. What stays with them is the charge that the face of the university is hidden, and that the time for pretending to be solemn has already passed.

An ivory tower, a market, and a 2016 case

There was a time, they write, when the university still held some share of an ideal of an ivory tower for the pursuit of truth. In the present they describe, that look has been taken into a dirty market economy, and the older pursuit of a pure, essential truth is not to be found — not even, they say, by a single ri. Undergraduates, they add, still pretend to a solemn strictness, and deceive themselves as they go on. The notes place this change in a period they associate with neoliberalism, which they define as a theory that criticises the state’s intervention in the market and stresses the market’s function and the free activity of private persons, and which, they write, came to the fore in earnest from the 1970s, pointing to the failure of a modified capitalism that had taken up Keynes. That dating and that definition are left as the notes write them.

They mention, as it occurred in 2016, irregular admission and irregular academic administration involving a young woman surnamed Jeong at a women’s university in Seoul. In their reading, the case shows a university that had left the liberal pursuit of truth and become a tool for private interest, private ease, and an easy path of advancement. Hearing of it, they write, one feels that the ideal, the ivory tower of the pursuit of truth, has already fallen into rubbish. People enter university for their own advancement, and enter high school in order to enter university; the process, in this account, pulls down the tower and leaves the relation with a teacher as no more, and no less, than a sharing of knowledge for that end. The 2016 case is kept in that year’s window, not recast as a later official total or a named scandal the notes do not give.

A shark and little fish, and a wish after Classroom Idea

From the first chapter of School is Dead they recall a parable: if a shark were a person, it would build a sturdy house in the sea for the little fish, fill it with food and plants and small animals, keep the water fresh, and teach the fish to trust and obey the beautiful plans it laid out for their future — rewarding the most obedient, and teaching them to despise materialist or Marxist leanings and to report anyone who showed such a sign. Schooling, in the writer’s account of the book, is formal education by which a state and those who follow it make their rule easier, wrapping it as higher education and as a basic right, and assigning a class. People cling to it, believing they will be given a better class; the poor, limited by money, often cannot finish, and those who give up fall into a deep despair when they see they will not obtain that social standing.

There is an irony, they stress: education is often run on taxes paid by the poorer people who benefit least, while those who usually gain from schooling are the economically comfortable. Society wraps itself as a society of equal opportunity, and yet, in this account, the poor pay for the education of the rich. Schools, the writer takes Reimer to say, teach obedience to the norms they state clearly, and also that norms they do not much state may be broken; they let students, by attending, stand before others without economic or political damage, and they help those who already have power in a world ruled by technique to gain from that relation, in a wide, subtle caste system that makes it hard for those without similar power to object. The writer’s closing wish is that middle-school, high-school, and university students, now living busy lives for a job or because others go, should, after Classroom Idea, still dream of an ideal of a real change, and should resist, conflict with, compromise with, and fight an unjust educational reality — an effort that, they hope, will help the environment later children walk through. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of School is Dead beside Classroom Idea, with the 2016 case left as the notes record it.

Last updated: 15 November 2026