Boot Camps Gaining Popularity With Korean Parents, Not Kids
By CHOE SANG-HUN
nytimes.com
POHANG, South Korea — Spitting plumes of white smoke, a wave of South Korean amphibious assault vehicles lands on the freezing cold beach.
Inside the armored vehicles, schoolchildren huddle in oversize helmets and camouflage fatigues. Some look terrified, but one girl snaps open a hand-held mirror to check her face before the landing. A 14-year-old boy dozes all the way to the beach.
“Some of these kids are hard cases to crack,” said Sgt. First Class Shim Sang-kyu, a crew-cut marine, shouting above the noise of the engine. “Our task is to reconstruct them into a better specimen of human being. We train them in the marine spirit.”
Each year, during summer and winter vacations, thousands of schoolchildren pass through a boot camp operated by the First Marine Division of South Korea in this industrial town on the southeast coast.
The program is devised to instill perseverance, confidence and teamwork, values cherished by South Korean parents who grew up through the deprivation of the postwar years.
Here, children roll in mud pits, jump with parachutes from platforms, wobble up hills, rappel down cliffs and crawl through barbed-wire obstacle courses.
The five-day program was introduced in 1997 during the Asian financial crisis. It became immediately popular with discouraged corporate workers and other civilians, and some adults still sign up.
But the biggest fans have been parents who believe that their children, raised in economic affluence, have forgotten the values, especially hard work, to which the parents attribute the country’s economic success. They say they also believe that a dose of boot camp, at a cost of $40 a person, is a good way of giving their children a leg up in the country’s demanding public school system. Many children are dragged to the camps kicking and screaming.
“We have parents who lure their children here by telling them that they were going on vacation to the beach,” said Lt. Byun Jin-seok. “Their parents drop the kids here and practically run away.” The children find themselves transported from the world of video games and junk food to a Spartan beachhead where unforgiving drill sergeants boast that they can make cows bark and dogs moo. The campers are required to turn in their cellphones and to eat and sleep in marine barracks, getting up at 6:30 a.m. and going to bed at 10:30 p.m.
The teenagers do push-ups and deep knee bends. With barking sergeants tailing them, groups of puffing teenagers charge into freezing water, balancing 265-pound rubber boats on their heads.
Here they are nothing more than numbers. No. 227 is Kim Ki-seol, the teenager who slept through the amphibious landing exercise. “My parents sent me here because I always pick fights with my brother and play computer games too much,” he said glumly, looking at his sand-caked sneakers. “They said I should learn the value of family while training here.” He added: “I wish this program would be over soon.”
Kim Soo-ram, a cheerful 13-year-old, said, “I thought my parents were joking” about coming here. She added: “I was virtually dragged in here. But now I kind of look cool in the uniform.”
Kim Min-seung and Kim Seung-hun, pale 14-year-old twins from Seoul with identical black-rimmed glasses, said their mother sent them here to shake them out of their lazy ways. “The hardest part is getting up early,” Min-seung said. “Once this thing is over and I go home, the first thing I want to do is to sleep.”
Many of the children brought here against their will are not eager to participate. Some refuse to get up in the morning, said Maj. Lee Yun-se.
During a training session on the beach, the teenagers complained of stiff necks and backaches. One boy, quivering in pants drenched with seawater and with tears in his eyes, asked a sergeant to find his lost shoe. At least some youths do change their attitudes by the end of the program, instructors and participants said.
Most of the 300 trainees here one recent week were teenagers, from the seventh grade and up. But the group also included middle-aged office workers and 30 college students from Pusan University of Foreign Studies whose professors required them to take the training to help make them more competitive in their job searches after graduation.
“Our industry is in a slump, so our company is sending all its middle-level managers to this camp to learn patience and perseverance,” said Lee Boo-kyun, 43, a construction company manager. “Our company’s president is a former marine, and you know the rest of the story.”
Some teenage boys said they had volunteered to get an early taste of a soldier’s life. All eligible South Korean men must serve 24 months in the military.
For Chung So-ra, a 37-year-old confectionery worker, the experience was like living a dream. “I always wanted to become a military officer,” she said. “But I failed the test three times.”
“This is my third time here,” she said. “I am going to take days off and come here again in the summer.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company |
