Physical Punishments in Korean Schools

Right off the bat, I have to tell you that this does NOT happen any longer, not even remotely. This is all in the past and I’ll be describing what USED TO happen in schools during the 1970s and 80s. My family immigrated to the US in 1983, so my Korean school experience ends there. These harsh, bordering on criminal, practices at school starts getting removed in the 90s and largely goes away in early 2000s.

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My first recollection of getting physical punishment (체벌, cheh-buhl, literally “physical punishment”) at school is when I was 7 or 8 years old, in 2nd grade. I was born in Seoul and grew up there until I was 7. Then, we had to move to Geochang (거창) in southern part of Korea, my forefathers’ hometown for generations, at the request of my grandfather.

You see, Gyongsang Province, of which Geochang County is a part of, has a very different dialect and intonation when it comes to speaking. If you’re not used to it, it might even sound like a foreign language. It would be analogous to an American who’s never heard a very thick Irish, Scottish, or Welsh accented English having trouble understanding. Apparently, I didn’t understand what the teacher was saying regarding homework and I hadn’t done it.

Time for punishment. The most common type is the above. What would you name that? Caning the palm of your hands? (It’s not a light tap, for sure.) To 7, 8-year-olds! The tool used for this type of punishment varies from a ruler, to a thin tree branch called hwae-cho-ri (회초리), to a drum stick like baton (shown above), to an outright baseball bat—I’m dead serious. I would say that the majority of physical punishment is of this kind—the only difference would be the type of tool used and how many times you get hit.

that’s the old Joseon way of punishing students. 회초리 to the calves.

After elementary school, I went to all-boys middle school and I naively thought that girls wouldn’t get this type of punishment. Wrong.

Here is another very common group punishment. A few kids mess up—like not doing the homework—and the entire class gets it. On your knees on your desks and hands up high. This is one of the easy ones to deal with, although you can work up quite a sweat after about 15 minutes of this.

But I’ve had one teacher that made all the boys do this and then get creative. Enter drum stick baton and you get caned on the exposed upper part of your thighs while kneeling on your desk. Your hands come down? Be ready for more “love,” as they used to say.

Obviously from a very old footage, but you do you see that big stick the thug so-called teacher is holding? And you can also see the girl on the left corner rubbing the back of her thighs/buttocks. If you did this in the military these days against strapping young men in their early 20s, you’d get court marshaled. To think this regularly happened to teenaged high school girls…

Group punishment, probably learned from the military training, was always favored by teachers. Sometimes I think they actually enjoyed it.

These were done to the girls. What do you think they did to the boys? Let’s start with an easy one.

Push up position with your fists on concrete or dirt. Yes, sometimes your knuckles get bloodied. If the teacher is in a good mood, that’s all you get. But if not, you get caned on the butt/back of your thighs in this position. This is one of the common ones also.

The student-beating technique sometimes got very innovative. I think I was in 7th grade when our class of 70 students had a Chinese writing teacher who I remember to be someone of a relatively young age, in her mid 20s, and very pretty. Her choice of punishment was… pinching. You mess up, you get called up to the front of the class, and she would grab a big chunk of your skin on the arm and twist it until it leaves a bruise. I was lucky enough to escape that wrath, but I’ve seen my friends develop quite the colorful bruises, some red, some blue, some purple. You make any sound from the pain? You get the matching set on the other arm.

The one I personally hated the most is this. I can’t find any pictures of it on the internet, so it must have been a creation of his own. I think it was a Korean history teacher (usually it’s the PE teachers that are the worst) when I was in 8th grade that came up with this.

He would say, “your hands out.” That means, your hands out with palms up, right? No, he would say, “no, no, turn them upside down.” Those are all bones. Then, he would hold the wooden ruler vertically, not the flat side down like shown in the above picture, and strike your knuckles with the edge. The most diabolical part of all that was, that he actually spent time thinking about how to inflict most amount of pain on the young boys.

Then, there’s the demeaning and the personal. The following is a clip from a hugely popular Korean movie called Friend (친구). There’s a scene in that movie that has sort of become a meme that represents how things used to be. It’s a little hard to watch, but this really used to happen. I’ve seen it with my own eyes a few times—teachers actually lose it and beat people up senseless while everyone is watching. Ponder that for a second—I left the country when I was 14.

Though unthinkable these days—things have shifted to the other extreme—this type of physical punishment, or downright beating, was part of everyday life for students in the 1970s, 80s, and the most of the 90s.

What pushed the whole thing over the edge was this incident that happened in 2010. It was captured on a cell phone by a student. A 6th grade (elementary school in Korea) teacher slapped a 12-year old, suspected of lying, with such force that the child fell to the floor and the teacher started kicking and stomping on him. The child was a hemophiliac, someone who has to be extra careful about getting bruises and bleeding.

At the risk of appearing to make fun of something deathly serious, I’m showing you the following to describe to you this maniac of a teacher’s nickname at the school.

There is this mythical technique called 장풍 (jang-poong, literally “wind from the palm of your hands”) where a highly trained martial artist can shoot out a puff of strong wind from bare hands to knock back the opponent. This teacher, with the last name Oh, was known as Oh Jang-poong at the school in question. He would push elementary school students with both hands on their chest/shoulder area and knock them back against the classroom walls.

This nut job, Oh (his full identity never revealed), was fired but not prosecuted. Because of this incident, the government hastily passed a law saying that no teacher can lay their hands on any student under any circumstances.

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I was a good student—never causing any trouble, did well academically—and still got most of these “love beatings” from time to time. Can you imagine what some of the “bad” students had to suffer through? (This is a terrible thing to say, but you do kinda get used to it a little.) Some of my classmates who had no interest in the academics would routinely say things like, “I’d rather get hit in the butt a few times with the baseball bat than to do the homework assignments.”

I remember a fellow classmate who couldn’t write his own name properly during the 7th grade. He was a Chang too, probably a distant relative of mine. In hindsight, I think he was intellectually limited for he couldn’t perform most of the basic skills as a student, but teachers didn’t care. They used to have a field day with picking on him and it was brutal.

Some of you might ask, “didn’t some of them get injured from these punishments?” Absolutely. I know of a classmate who had a burst ear drum, broken bones on the hands, skin cut open, bump and swelling of the skull, bloodied nose, loose tooth…

Pardon me if it seems like I’ve painted a very serious subject matter in mild levity, but if I hadn’t, it would have been too depressing for me to think back and write about it.