IN THE cherry-tree-studded hills a couple of hours south-east of Seoul sits a bungalow-style school building made of dark bricks. Its wooden floors are lovingly polished. The brightly coloured walls are lined with books and toys. The only thing it is missing is children. Forty years ago, in the region’s heyday as a mining area, Bobal primary school had more than 300 pupils. Today it has three: one girl and two boys, looking forlorn among the empty chairs. The school is only being kept open because a handful of villagers mounted a campaign to resist the education ministry’s plan to merge it with the one in the next town, ten kilometres away. “Keeping the school is important for the community,” says Kim Jung-hoon, whose daughter is one of the three pupils left. “How will we ever persuade families to stay if there is nowhere to go for their children?”
But the education ministry’s plan, which Mr Kim and his fellow activists see as an assault on their village, is a symptom of a...Continue reading
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