The invisible part of iceberg is far larger than its visible part. In a culture defying this iceberg principle, emphasis is put on something visible and tangible. This ill-conceived emphasis is largely behind several major problems eroding either individual or national competitiveness.
    On the surface, a culture of valuing something visible at the expense of something invisible seems to pay off. However, secrets to excellent, lasting performances in sports, music and scholarship call for a culture whose emphasis is the other way around. Although hands are visibly used in tennis, the relatively invisible action of busy footwork enables a player to prepare well for a good stroke or other hand-oriented techniques. Mr. Dongryul Sun, a Korean legendary pitcher, says that the strength of a pitcher’s legs, among other things, makes the difference between good pitching and bad pitching. During his days as a player, Mr. Sun made it a daily rule to run up a long flight of stairs. Cellist Han-Na Chang’s teacher, Mr. Mstislav Rostropovich, asked her not to do public performances more than four times per month and asked her to read a lot of literary works including Dostoevsky, instead. Ms. Chang now studies Philosophy at Harvard University. So far the Departments of Medicine, Law and Education, whose visible popularity has something to do with a prospect for economic prosperity, have resided in undergraduate schools in South Korea. Students fresh from high schools are ineligible for these departments in many advanced countries like Canada, which penetrates something visible to understand the importance of the relatively invisible. Applicants to medical schools are expected to have a solid foundation of scientific knowledge and humanistic maturity. As dictated by the variety in different walks of life, applicants to law schools are expected to have studied particular areas, where they will apply their future legal expertise. Those who want to study teaching methodology are expected to have already a solid foundation of subject knowledge and humanistic maturity.
    In a way that prefers something visible over something relatively invisible, English Education normally takes place in South Korea and, thus, English learners here are generally bad at discussion and written composition, which is beyond street and playground English. For ordinary people, their daily lives normally present more opportunities for cognitively undemanding language use than for cognitively demanding usage. In a backlash against the traditional translation-and-grammar method, English Education in South Korea tends to emphasize the visible activity of conversation. A zeal for this visible activity is well reflected in the fact that many Korean children have gone so far as to undergo surgeries on their tongues. Here is the rub: Unfortunately, in the country, conversation means a perverted version of communication language learning, which shortchanges the relatively invisible but fundamental language skills of reading and writing. In the 1950’s and the 1960’s, Korean graduate students could thrive in the United States largely because of their skills in reading and writing, which they had solidified in their home country, when back then tape recorders/players were rare. A high English proficiency of current Korean students suffers while their English Education takes place in a way that, as described above, throws the baby out with the bathwater.
    The culture of valuing something visible at the cost of something relatively invisible encourages an attempt to promote product-rather-than-process-orientation as a shortcut to success. This promotion finds expression in the Korean saying: Whatever transportation system you may use, getting to Seoul is the most important thing. In fact, an attempt at peripherally marginalizing a process proves to be a recipe for failure. Perhaps most typical of a process-peripheral method in foreign language education, memorizing de-contextualized words and phrases usually fails those who seriously attempt to communicate with others in the target language. Reasons for learning/teaching language in the context become compelling, if attention is given to why many people read the whole story of Choonhyangjeon rather than know of its theme reported by others or watch a whole sport game rather than know of only the game results. With a process-peripheral mentality prevailing, apparently teachers’ colleges in South Korea have thought nothing of their long-standing practice of staffing their faculty largely with Ph.D. holders who have never had substantial experiences of teaching at the educational level at which their students will teach. Also this process-peripheral mentality is largely responsible for textbooks-based curriculums of which most Korean stakeholders of education apparently think nothing. One-stop-shopping textbooks work to obviate the need for library-based research, which would foster students’ creativity, imaginativeness, and originality in the attendant process of reading, thinking and writing. Under a strictly textbooks-based curriculum, thus, students’ brains tend to be reduced to copiers.
    The notion of upholding product at the expense of process paralyzes the important function of language as a tool for knowledge construction. Language has the dual nature of becoming a product and a process. While representing a product of already constructed information/knowledge, language represents a process: People construct knowledge/information through language. An idea verbally formulated by one participant in dialogue triggers another participant’s conceptualization and verbal formulation of another idea and vice versa. The ill-conceived view of language exclusively as product lies below the way a typical class in South Korea unfolds. Whether teacher-fronted or student presentation-based, a class in the country normally lacks discussion sessions in which the two functions of language can be at their best. As the audience has not read a common text or thought about a given topic beforehand, student presenters can do little more than what a teacher in a teacher-fronted class does: impart knowledge/information to the whole class. Thus, for those who view language exclusively as product, learning/teaching is almost all about listing knowledge items, not critiquing them. This view causes an exclusively teacher-fronted methodology to be rampant.
    Any social/educational convention that defies the iceberg principle by shortchanging something invisible and process only erodes the long-term competitiveness of individuals and their community. Intellectuals supposedly take it upon themselves to flag and rectify this corrosive convention. Unfortunately, now intellectuals courageous enough to do so seem to be in extremely short supply in South Korea, where, to an alarming degree, cutting corners is equated with being smart.

Dr. Chinhyon Kim teaches the English courses of New York Times Editorials: Discussion & Composition, Conversation, Writing and Global English at CNU.