Student baseball players, baseball coaches and parents from Paichai High School and Gwangju Jeil High School visit the May 18th National Cemetery on July 10. Paichai traveled to Gwangju to apologize after members of its baseball team made remarks that allegedly mocked the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement during a game.JANG JEONG-PIL
Choi Jin-seok
The author is a principal of the Saemal Saemomjit School.
Intellectually mature people see beyond the present moment. Because they look farther across time and space, they recognize the deeper currents and values that approach slowly from behind rather than be dazzled by what sparkles before their eyes. They are, therefore, neither impatient nor disturbed by periods of waiting.
Those who lack such maturity remain trapped inside the narrow tube of the “here and now.” Unable to imagine the greater value that lies ahead, they become fixated on appearances, fleeting statistics and the herd mentality. Unaware that a great wave is building in the distance, they exhaust themselves reacting to ripples at their feet.
Why should people cultivate intellect? Because civilization itself is the product of thought. The more intellectual a person becomes, the more clearly he understands that the things of greatest value arrive later. Impatience and shallow thinking are chronic illnesses afflicting those who fail to develop intellectually.
Education also demands a long view. It resembles planting seeds and waiting for the seasons to change far more than a factory racing to maximize production. Without patience, both children and seeds grow distorted.
Immature views of education are obsessed with immediate results. The clearest examples are indiscriminate early instruction and rote learning that begin in childhood. Parents become addicted to the satisfaction brought by visible achievements and neglect the intellectual capacities that education is meant to cultivate. When the time finally comes for those abilities to matter, children often find themselves unable to think independently.
Minor accomplishments achieved too early end up crushing the larger forms of growth that should emerge later: intellectual curiosity, self-direction and the capacity for deep inquiry. This is not education but violence.
Taken to an extreme, such violence produces the spectacle of parents enrolling their children in “kindergarten medical school classes” and congratulating themselves on their devotion. Truly valuable intellectual assets, however, are always the result of long periods of waiting.
During childhood, what matters most are activities that cannot be immediately converted into test scores: running freely, asking strange questions and leafing through books. Such experiences enrich the soil of the mind. Though parents may feel anxious because these activities seem unproductive, children who are trusted and given time often surge ahead as they enter advanced study and confront real-world problems. Their inner identity and intellectual curiosity sustain them.
In “Emile” (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered a famous paradox: “The most useful rule of all education is not to gain time but to lose it.” Was he not simply saying that what is most valuable arrives later?
The impulse to punish distortions of the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement through special legislation stems from similar impatience. Many fear that hateful speech, malicious slander and false information could immediately undermine historical justice. Unable to trust the slower mechanisms of education and civil society, they seek to suppress such claims through state power.
But democracy derives its strength from the fact that the state does not legislate truth and falsehood. No matter how distorted a claim may be, truth ultimately prevails through debate and reflection within civil society. That capacity for self-correction emerges only with time.
History offers the same lesson. Communist systems that sought to remake humanity through state planning were ultimately defeated by democracies that trusted human autonomy, tolerance and the power of time.
Once governments begin restricting interpretations of historical events through legislation, they may appear to prevent distortions in the short term. In the long run, however, they block the pathways of critical thought. Without critical thinking, citizens cannot develop the intellectual capacities that raise a society’s level of culture. A society that closes off such possibilities moves steadily toward totalitarianism.
The desire to eliminate factual distortions immediately resembles the impatience behind rote education. It reflects a failure to understand that what is truly valuable comes later. When intellectual growth stalls and impatience takes hold, large things begin to appear small and small things large. A society becomes obsessed with correcting visible distortions while risking the loss of democracy itself.
Those who grow impatient over the ripples on the surface can never grasp the deep currents of the sea. Maturity begins with the belief that the most valuable things always arrive a little later, but when they do, they arrive in magnificent form.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
