Asked "Why did you emigrate to America?" in the 1970s, when I worked as a correspondent in the U.S., nine out of 10 ordinary Korean migrants replied they did so to provide a good education for their children. Korean parents, at home or abroad, devote themselves so much to the education of their children that international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development cite Korea's enthusiasm for education as a reason for its economic growth. They told their children, "Study hard and live a prosperous life to resolve the bitterness we experienced because we were too poor to study."

But the results we saw were not necessarily desirable. Once the children go to American schools, everything else will fall into place, the thinking went. Being unable to speak English, most working-class emigrants could not even think of meeting their children’s teachers. Even if they were able to communicate in English, they were too busy earning a living to go to parent-teacher meetings. The children led their lives apart from their parents and roamed the streets. Living in blue-collar neighborhoods, the schools the children attended were often prone to crime and offered a poor educational environment. Not all of them, of course, but the children of many Korean emigrants, lived lives without pride or community consciousness, and eventually ended up on the wrong side of the tracks. In the end, many Koreans who went to America for the sake of their children's education saw their children ruined by it instead.

The case of Seung-hui Cho, who shot dead 32 people at Virginia Tech, is in a way part of the negative journey of the children of working-class emigrants, though in his case mental illness played a major part. The world Cho aspired to was circumscribed, as his manifesto shows, by “Benz,” “vodka”, “cognac” and “diamonds.” He essentially had no sense that vastly more people in this world never get to go to college at all. That shows the limitations of the education in the “humanities” he got, and these limitations in the end exploded through the muzzle of a gun. This, too, is the cold reality bred by the wealth gap. It shows that even at the moment when we feel a sense of pride in many 1.5 and second-generation Koreans who have achieved their American dream, there is in the U.S. another group of Koreans who fall through the net.

This renews the appeal of the advice Kim Yu-mi, who has taught English as a second language in the U.S. for 25 years, offered in a recent interview with the Chosun Ilbo. What is the point of letting your children learn only English? She demanded of Korean mothers. The children have no cultural education or manners, she said, and that way they can’t dream of getting into college, or if they do, global businesses won’t hire them when they graduate. Global corporations increasingly judge applicants by putting them up in a hotel for a week and assessing their general social standards while they eat, watch sports, appreciate opera and plays, and mingle in nightclubs, she pointed out.

It has been a long time since universities were regarded as educating the whole man or woman. Universities have largely become businesses, both in terms of quantity and quality. They are merely places where subjects are taught to a higher level; they can no longer produce a rounded human being. In that respect, the U.S. and Korea are much the same. In this country, of course, we can hardly expect it to be otherwise, seeing as the government lists all seats of higher learning as if they were so many vocational training centers.

Human nature is nurtured in the home and in the process of primary education. Children learn from their parents, friends and teachers. If we look around us, we find that teaching the children the values of trusting and loving the family, respecting elders and observing etiquette toward them, being honest and strict with themselves, considering friends and neighbors and refraining from causing them trouble is sidelined by after-school classes in math and essay writing. Too many youngsters live only for themselves, have no regard for others in the street, in restaurants, in traffic, in theaters and public spaces. How many homes are there where grace is said before and after meals? "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten," was the title of a book by Robert Fulghum many years ago. The title resonates more than ever.