More than 4,000 elementary, middle and high schools across Korea have shut their doors as the country’s student population shrinks, new data shows.
According to the Ministry of Education’s latest figures, revealed on Sunday by Rep. Jin Sun-mee of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, since 1980, 4,008 schools under 17 regional education offices nationwide have closed as of March this year. During the period, the number of enrolled students decreased from 9.9 million to 5.07 million.
Be careful you’re not thinking like a neoliberal (endless growth) when you look at South Korea. In my opinion they’re a model, and we should be looking at depopulation everywhere.
Dear God, can we talk about issues like these without immediately dropping “nei liberal” and what not?
And if you think that South Korea is a model for the rest of the world then I’d urge you to think again.
Demographics are a bitch, and a big one. It’s slow, like a freight train, but once you hear the horn sounding it’s too late and you’ll be splattered. Any country should have a birth rate of about 2.1, make it 2 if you slowly and safely want to shrink the population over time. The problem with a Korea is that it’s going all way too fast and they’re not fixing anything.
They don’t get enough children for a number of reasons, one being that people are worked to death there while still not making enough money to start a family. If you want families having babies you’ll need a family where one works and yet can support that entire family. You want parents to be able to have time to raise their children too. Or hell, at least give free childcare facilities so that people can work while having children.
As far as I can tell, s Korea has tried a wide variety of incentives for people to have more babies, without actually doing anything about fixing the core issue: their work culture.
What will happen next is probably not very pretty. They have few to any immigrants, so no help there either. Schools start closing because not enough kids. People will have to move to the big cities for their children to have an education at all, so you’ll start seeing the small villages disappear over time
The current work force will get older and stop working but then who will do the work? There ain’t enough kids to replace them. Let the old continue working after 65? Sure. Until when? 70? 80? I mean, someone needs to actually do the work to get food on the table.
Meanwhile South Korea has a bit of a problem with it’s northern neighbor. So it needs a big standing army or be overrun or destroyed by the dictator from the north. How do you have an army when you don’t have enough kids to even feed your own population?
South Korea as a country is dying and by now I think it’s too late to do it naturally. They’ll have to start looking into immigration soon or within a decade or two it’ll be the end for them. Seriously, none of this is unexpected, and I’m sure the government there knows this yet they’re not doing shit about it.
I gave up on making a point. For some reason people think a massive depopulation in a short period of time will be just fine. You can argue depopulation but apparently there is never too quick or it’s “neoliberal talking points” or some other bullshit trope.
All nuance is somehow lost anymore.
I don’t get care whether or not you like a word, it’s the appropriate one.
I said South Korea is a model for depopulation. Respond to what I say instead of what you want to be angry about, please.
They have low birth rates because they’re a wealthy country. Wealth is the most simple indicator of birth rate. Projecting your weird Asian stereotypes onto South Korea is…odd.
No, Sourh Korea isn’t “dying”. That’s the neoliberal framing. It remains to be seen how they deal with a low birth rate…and we should be watching because the phenomenon is going to happen in more and more places. My country, Canada, contracted in the last quarter, for example.
Neoliberals are scrambling everywhere because they used to love immigration, legal or otherwise, but they brought in so many immigrants to ensure growth that they created a fascist black lash and are now fighting over “preferred” immigrants (which will result in population loss).
That’s why we had the plandemic. Don’t ask me how this helps the secret wealthy cabal that runs the world, I haven’t been able to get an answer to that yet.
The fuck are you talking about?
Those are the kinds of things people say around me in real life. It makes no sense if you understand credibility and confirmation bias. Yet it persists.
Maybe rephrase? That didn’t help.