Let them Think! The Importance of Teaching Our Children the Freedom of Thought

"I was trusting, too. I never doubted what I was told: Heaven and earth are great, but greater still is the kindness of the Communist Party; father and mother are dear, but dearer still is Chairman Mao." "We are young pioneers, successors to communism. Our red scarves flutter on our chests." - Ji Li Jiang, Red Scarf Girl; A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution

Chairs scratch against the floor as the announcements come to an end, rifling through the moment of silence experienced just moments before. I stop whatever I'm doing and stand with the teacher for whom I TA and our class of 22 adorable 2nd graders, our right hands placed firmly over our hearts as our voices ring out in unison.

 "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The Pledge of Allegiance. Nothing more, nothing less.

And it bothers me every single time.

Some of you might wonder why in the world I should choose to juxtapose quotes from Chinese communist ideology to the Pledge of Allegiance of democratic America, but here I wish to make a point. At the foundation of every society's communal beliefs is education. Whatever we imbibe during the most formative years of our lives is most likely that which has already been demonstrated to us by other members of our society as true, whether it really is true or not. Usually, these beliefs contain societal expectations as to how we are to act in accordance with what we are taught (review the words of the Pledge of Allegiance). Now, the first quote is taken from a memoir of a young woman (Ji Li Jiang) and her experiences during China's Cultural Revolution. At the time, communism and the prevalence of the Communist Party had gained huge amounts of support in China. Mao Zedong was in the middle of reforming China and gaining the support of the people for his heinous exploits by providing them with an influx of information that stated the greatness of the Communist Party. The young were especially affected by his brainwashing, as demonstrated by the formation of the Red Guard, a group of communist youth so bent on reforming China according to Mao's beliefs that the dictator himself saw their acts as too extreme and put an end to their efforts.

Brainwashing. What a convenient term when it doesn't apply to us, right?

Or does it? Review the Pledge of Allegiance again.

Like all other nations, America provides it's citizens with one resounding, yet unspoken, motto: Our nation is the best. Our way of life is the best. You should put your faith in our system of government because it is the best. And, by default, all other ways of doing things are inferior. So, since we are the best, we deserve your undivided allegiance and adoration. As a citizen of this country, you are expected to be loyal under all circumstances and even die if need be to save your country from the inferior influences of other nations.

Now, I am certain that none of my students can even understand the meaning of the words they recite every morning. And that's what bothers me the most. Before they can even process the words they are speaking, we tell them that their allegiance lies with America and imply that they are wrong if they dare to think differently. This is not only evident in the pledge; look at the way we teach history. So often when our students learn history, we fail to teach them all sides of the story. Many things our nation does  are cast in a rosy hue, while those things done against us are criminal acts deserving punishment. The bombing of Pearl Harbor? Unacceptable. Our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Well, it was a necessary evil (Note: I have not fully decided myself what I believe about the necessity of this bombing. I hesitate to conclude on this topic because I am not aware of the information that led to the decision to bomb the country, but I firmly suspect that the commonly taught idea that the ending of the war justified the sheer loss of human life and just about everything else that was decimated and had no correlation to the war other than it happened to be in Japan at the wrong time. I also suspect a bit of racism was involved, but since I find my knowledge lacking, I am only using it to raise the point that we conclude it was a necessary evil only because we lack knowledge about it and have been preconditioned to trust our government).

As a result of all of this, many young people form their beliefs on what they have been taught without giving them much thought.  This is what psychological theorists call foreclosure (although it usually used in terms of identity), and it is generally discouraged because it means that the person is letting whatever he or she believes be defined by someone other than himself or herself. The danger of foreclosure when it comes to things like this is that it makes it easier for politicians that will actually harm the nation and perhaps other nations as well to rise to power because the people are not thinking critically but instead acting according to what they have already been conditioned to do. Some of these cases are not too extreme, but take North Korea for example. Their whole ideology revolves around their leader's divine nature. They have been taught that their nation is the greatest and that they can do nothing wrong. They have foreclosed, allowing several notorious dictators rule their country for the past half century and commit heinous acts because they digested information saying that the leaders were a blessing to them and that other countries are far inferior to them.

Some would argue with me that this is not the case. After all, don't we encourage freedom of speech and free thought? Of course we do. I am not criticizing that area of America - in fact, I applaud it. What I am trying to say is that we should be fully aware of what we are teaching our children (and ourselves) and the consequences it could have. After all, if we are continually being taught to be true to whatever our society commonly accepts as right or even beneficial and do not stop to think about what we are being fed, then we are more easily susceptible to harming ourselves by accepting something before studying all sides of it.

Sometimes I think I'm going to be the world's worst teacher because of this, because so much of what it means to be a teacher is teaching children what society views as valuable. However, I have resolved that I am not going to teach my students to form an unquestioned allegiance to a government or a set of ideas no matter how commonly they are accepted but rather encourage them to seek out facts and arguments from every side of a situation that they encounter in order to develop people that truly exercise the freedom of thought, speech, and opinion. Does this mean I will teach them to have faith in nothing about their native country? Of course not! Just as every country has bad points, every country has good in it as well. I hope that they will leave my classroom passionate for truth even if it flies in the face of popular belief, whether it be in religion, politics, morale, etc.

Feel free to comment with your own thoughts about this or any other related topic, and please remember that I am not trying to bash America, glorify/bash China, or anything else that I think I commonly come across as doing without intending to do so. I really think that all countries have their strengths and their faults, and am using America as an example because it was what strikes home for most of my audience and using all other countries only to put things into perspective.

Meet the Characters!

So, as most of you already know I am currently in the middle of a novel. Well, recently, I've been feeling kind of a writer's block with it and decided to write down the characters and what they are doing in the story and what-not.

For those of you who aren't writers and wonder why in the world I would ever do that, please note that characters are SO essential to a good story. Each character needs to be unique in their own way but at the same time very believable to the reader. This is accomplished through an intense amount of work by the writer, which usually (in my case) begins with a rough idea of what their personality is like, what makes them passionate/mad/happy/what they live for/what they believe is important/etc. and then proceeds on to details about their past and present that gives reasons for why they are the way they are. Also, just as people respond to situations within the framework of their personality, past, etc., so characters also determine where the book goes next by responding to it in their own unique way. That should explain why I sometimes say something strange like, "My characters fell in love without my permission," or "My characters are not doing what I want them to." Writers more often than not simply shape characters and set them loose on a situation they know will be trying to them and watch them react.

Anyway, all that being said, I want you to meet the characters of my newest novel. They've been a lot of fun to think tip and dream of (although I am thinking of cutting some of them).

Oh and another side note...here you'll see me referencing an entertainment company full of singers and dancers alongside words like "audition", "trainee", etc. Although I do tend to write about things of which I have no idea about (hey, it's a great way to learn!), just trust me on this. Maybe on a different post I'll go into Korea's entertainment industry and the ways it operates (this is essential to the story, so if I end up posting more of that on here I'll explain it). But for now, just trust that I actually have a relatively great deal of knowledge on this and I know what I'm doing.

Anyway, here are my characters (sorry for any mistakes...I got sick of typing long before I was done with this)! And feel free to comment about them/present things you think I can change!

Kim Ha Na, a young, ambitious woman, previously involved in the arts, loses her little sister in a tragic car accident, where it is a hit and run and the killer cannot be found. There were no witnesses, only a pile of red roses and a dead body. When she sees her boyfriend at school the next few days and tells him about the accident, he seems cold and distant, even though he says he’s perfectly fine. About a week after the accident, however, she receives a mysterious suicide note from him, vaguely alluding to something plaguing him. She believes it is her sister’s death, since the two were close, and determines to catch the killer. She gets excused from the entertainment industry to go to school as to become a full-time detective under her father’s police division. She has worked hard on the case of her little sister ever since, as well as the cases of others, and she constantly seeks to bring criminals to justice and preventing others from getting hurt. But then her father asks her unexpectedly to leave the case and work instead on a smaller scale crime in an entertainment company as an undercover agent. Her talent is quickly recognized and she is soon assigned as his lead dancing partner, which leads to a friendship among the two.

Kwon Seunghyun, known better by the alias Monster, considers himself dead. He has considered himself dead since the day he hit his girlfriend’s little sister and killed her. He couldn’t face her. He couldn’t live with the fact that he had crushed her. And as much as he wanted to tell her it would be okay, as much as he wanted to comfort her, his heart screamed the questions hers only began to raise. So he left her. He left it all, and tried to take his life. His mother caught him and convinced him not to and to rather throw himself into his dream of being a singer. This he did, but he still hates himself. And now, he hates himself for letting her go. He drinks away his problems almost every night and engages in a loveless fling to hide his pain. Often, he thinks of the time when his music career, the only thing truly keeping what he considers his corpse animated, is over and he can truly die. He doesn’t necessarily like the idea, but it’s better than the pain he is in. But then he meets the new dancer, a girl that looks remarkably like the woman he left in a trail of tears years back. At first, he attempts to just ignore her but is plagued by the fact that he let her go in the first place so he stalks her as well, but then she gets cast as his lead dancing partner in the upcoming tour, and there is talk eventually of even debuting them as a group. They must work together, with her attempting to uncover his crimes and he trying to keep his secrets.

Michelle, the antagonist of the story, is a confident, cut-throat make-up artist with a dirty secret. She prides herself on being trained in Hollywood, and her superior expertise is what she shows to the professionals, but her dark past as the child of a homeless prostitute has caused her to take up whatever jobs she can in the spare time to provide for her mother’s constant medical needs. One of her many jobs is to work her sexuality to get stuff out of people for the benefit of whoever pays money. She has done many undercover jobs, and her most recent one is for Kimmie’s crazy mother, who will stop at nothing  to get her daughter in the spotlight. As a result, Michelle has befriended Kimmie with the intent to let her get the limelight once Monster gets exploited. But in the meantime, she actually begins to develop feelings for Monster, and doesn’t want to use him to exploit anyone, but has to if she is to keep her mother alive. She begins to try to win Monster’s heart, but when she sees that he is beginning to like the new dancer, Michelle begins to secretly investigate her as well, and, once she figures out who she is, tries to sabotage her reputation.

Joo Eun Seung believes that one is only as good as they can perform. Beauty, hair, make-up, talent, voice, dancing, and acting…she succeeds at all of them very well and applies the same rigorous work ethic to her current job, which is a detective and owner of a club at night. This allows her to keep proper tabs on her daughter who is in the entertainment industry, since many of the entertainers and trainees populate this club. She has found out why her daughter isn’t becoming famous – the company she’s with doesn’t think she would gain them much profit because her talent is mediocre compared to the rest of the stars. So the mother sets out to sabotage the company’s reputation. Chiefly, she has in mind to destroy the lives of the stars by discovering their dirty secrets and publicizing it. She hires a young make-up artist (Michelle) to spy for her. Specifically, she has heard rumors of Monster’s dark past and is curious about the young man behind the mask. She tells Michelle to seduce him and learn his secrets. She was once a very promising Chinese singer and performer, but she received a severe beating from her drunken father, who was angered that he didn’t have a son that could fight in the military like he could, one night, and made her sign a contract to go into the military. While in the military, she received several injuries and underwent corrective surgery, After her healing time, which took two full years, she attempted to return to the performance scene but they wouldn’t take her due to her old age and the fact that her corrective surgeries made it difficult for her to dance. Angry at her father, she resolves to protect people from fate’s like hers by becoming a cop, which she promptly enters school for.

Kang Ji Eun considers herself as a kind, humble warrior attempting to make good in people’s lives. She is very considerate and loves to listen to people’s sides of the story, but remains fully grounded in her beliefs. Her heart is for the mentally hurting, and she loves to help them through giving them advice. Her brother almost died of a mental disease that was not properly managed and so she wants to help others suffering from similar things. She is the one that knows the most about Monster’s past, but does not know it all. She knows about Ha Na, but is not entirely sure how he lost her or about the incidences surrounding Hye Mi’s death. Her policy is to keep everything her clients tell her secret unless it is a life-threatening issue. Thus, she wouldn’t even report Monster’s crime if she found out. She guards a wealth of personal secrets, and is attempting to guard him with her life, even if it means her career. She is not very careful about Ha Na, however, because he has confessed to her that Ha Na is the girl that he loved in the beginning. She thinks Ha Na will be healthy for Monster because she will give him someone to tell everything to; someone he can finally open up completely with and find love and healing. She doesn’t understand, then, when he doesn’t, and begins to search for some answers of her own. She usually doesn’t probe into personal matters of her clients, but it gets to the point where she must choose to either defend her client by knowing the information or let him fall into enemy hands. Even so, she does her snooping surreptitiously – mainly, through conversations with Ha Na at various times in the story, which makes Monster mad. Later, when Monster is found guilty, she too is imprisoned on the day of the trial for knowing too much and saying too little. Ha Na, therefore, has the job of getting them both out unharmed.

Pipo, aka Yoo Young Jin, views himself as one of the world’s most beautiful people and thrives on competition. A dancer, he is known for his beauty and boyish charm. Already a very successful model, this young man loves to trample everyone that attempts to get in his way. Ever since he was a little boy from a fishing village near the sea, he has dreamt of being the greatest of all. And, ever since he actually got into the entertainment company, he not only dreamed of being the best but knew he was the best.  He, therefore, is very frustrated that the company owner has not yet given him a debut and wants him still only as a back-up dancer. He obviously would be thrilled if Monster’s reputation were damaged so that he could shine more brightly. Therefore, when Michelle later asks him to spy on every move of Monster’s in the places where she cannot go, he wholeheartedly agrees to do so.

Pepo, aka Yoo Eun Woo, has a great passion for what he does, but, unlike his brother, views it as something he does because he enjoys it. Although he does a preference for pink clothes and all the pretty things they give him (indeed, he does like to play dress-up, but Pipo never wants to play it because he can’t deal with the fact that his brother can be so much prettier than him without even trying), but he respects his sunbaes and rather admires them instead of trying to beat them. Even though he loves to tease and is mostly, especially towards Kimmie, a little spitball of sass (he learned it in order to have fun with his extremely competitive brother). He does take comments personally and secretly hates always living in his brother’s shadow, but he pities those going through really hard times because he knows the pressure to be perfect is ridiculous and still believes somewhere inside of him that the person inside is more important than the perfect person they try to portray, but even he struggles to believe this sometimes and he doesn’t necessarily recognize it at first.  He loves eating anything and everything, especially if it has meat, but he hates pork because he also loves pigs. He also loves ramen, and misses his mom’s cooking at home. He is gentle, but a dark horse competitor in that he is not afraid to work for what he wants. He falls deeply in love with Kimmie, mostly because he pities her and her attempts at perfection all the while living under the pressure of a high-performance stressing mother who really won’t approve of her daughter unless and until she is at the top. He knows nothing of Monster’s past, he just kind of views him as a casualty of the company. The reason he exists in this drama is to fight for the justice of the trainees. He’s not very vocal about it all the time, but he becomes the emotional backbone of the group when Kimmie’s pregnancy becomes known.

Kimmie, aka Kim Seo Young, believes at first, like her mother, that to be beautiful is to be everything. She is highly competitive, her biggest frenemy being Pipo because they are forced to live with one another but are constantly competing with each other to be the best at everything and sometimes don’t get along very well. But, usually, at the end of the day they go to bed friends. What she doesn’t know, however, is that Pipo has developed a bit of a crush on her, and what Pipo wants he always makes sure he gets. Kimmie’s goal: debut and become the best in the company. She oftentimes uses her aegyo to win people over to her side, but it seldom works with people like her choreographer noona. She especially attempts to use it on monster, because she has a big crush on him and believes that if he asked her out they would be forced to give her a debut. She is a bit tired of being defined only as what caliber she can perform at, but she doesn’t know any other way so she plays all the games. When she was little, she used to cry herself to sleep. Now she solves it by reading SSKiss magazines and anything else that would soothe her mind. If it’s a hard day, she does sometimes still cry. Secretly, she is jealous of trainees like Pepo that have great relationships with his or her mom. She really wants to please her mom and for her mom to like her, so she tries to perform at top caliber. She takes criticisms pretty hard, as they always tear at the only thing she thinks is really important. She loves good publicity, though, and is willing to do whatever it takes to get it.  During her crisis, though, she needs lots of support due to the constant bad media, the anger of her mother, and the fact that she casts the entire company into a tumultuous lawsuit. However, Pepo sees her need and becomes there for her at all times. This is when she finally confirms her love for him.

Kim In Suk’s has been plagued with the reality of his daughter’s death ever since it happened. As a police detective, he has been desperate to find the killer and finally bring peace and restoration to his and his hurting daughter’s hearts. He used to be a smiling father, happily married to his wife and living with his two daughters until Hye Mi died and his precious wife soon followed the girl down to the grave in grief. All he has now is Ha Na, but even though he loves her, he finds it hard to get past the lump in his heart and show her strength and courage and joy. Indeed, he sometimes feels ashamed that often she seems like the strong one, the one that works up the strength to smile despite the circumstances and the one who, even though she is tired at the end of the day, always finds the strength to come home and make some food for the both of them, even if it is just a TV dinner eaten on the couch of their apartment while the newsman relates what they already know from that day: a boy missing, a man killed, a woman weeping that her husband beat her. He cares. He cares a whole lot, but sometimes he just feels numb. These issues are so much a part of daily life to him that, even though they strike him with sympathy, he can now view them without cringing. The only nerve that still strikes its deepest in his heart is that of his daughter.  He will stop at nothing to find the killer, even if it means late nights and giving up everything he has. The only thing he wouldn’t give up would be his other daughter, so when the time comes for her to audition as a spy to the entertainment company, he is very reluctant to let her go. But he knows that he must, so he sends Tae Joon along with her. He severely beats all the people suspected to be involved in his daughter’s death and keeps close tabs on Ha Na after he lets her go. At this point, he is also in charge of figuring out what happened to some security guards that got too close to the true past of Monster, because they were mysteriously and violently cast out. Curiously, however, they won’t talk and are now living on a large sum of money.

Li Ai Qing is a trainee from China who is seeking to make her debut in the Korean entertainment world. She is a lot like Pipo, but has a crush on him and thinks that Kimmie does too so she competes with her all the time. She has traveled a far way for her work and is a favorite of Na Eun, the choreographer. She would like nothing better than to knock Kimmie off her game.

Gil Na Eun considers herself at the top of her game. She is a tough choreographer, and expects nothing less than perfection from her students. She lives in the dorm with Ha Na, Pipo, Pepo, Kimmie, and Ai Qing and enforces strict rules such as diets and bedtimes. Of course, the kids do have a stash under their beds, but that’s irrelevant. She gets frustrated with them most times and never lets them have any fun. Her part in the story: criticize everyone, make them sick of perfection, etc.

Yang Hyun Joo, the CEO of the entertainment company, is a shrewd business person with a bent for churning out idols and making lots of money. He only expects the best from his employees and trainees. Everyone else is dropped. He is at first hesitant to take Ha Na, not knowing her background and how good she is. On the insisting that his safety and the safety of those around him is threatened, however, he agrees. Currently, he is preparing the company for two big things: the annual company show and Monster’s tour. He wants only the best of the performers at this show and therefore everyone is working super hard to impress him.  Astonishingly, however, he ends up really liking Ha Na, as she is super talented. He ends up considering two things: 1. Casting her alongside Monster for the company show, and 2. Debuting her as a solo artist or having her feature on Monster’s album. He presents these ideas to her, and she wants to accept them really badly.  In her heart, she still loves performing and just wants to be on the stage. He really hopes that she accepts.