ABSTRACT
A glaring consequence of the pressure was a high number of student suicides connected to school stress, about one hundred each year (The Korea Herald 1989, November 10, 2), commonly caused, as one girl lamented in her suicide note, because she wanted to ‘live in a world where human beings are not judged by test scores’ (The Korea Herald 1989, August 27, 3). The society appeared to accept these child deaths with a pained resignation, as if they were tragic but inevitable, and just the visible tip of the iceberg of suffering - a contemporary han - endured by families in
order to have their children succeed at school. The impacts of the globalising economy on education were felt early on in South Korea as one of the foremost developing nations through the latter decades of the 20th century. As Friedman (2000, 382) commented, ‘even within the Cold War system America was hard at work building out a global economy for its own economic and strategic reasons’.
