<Three Idiots> and The Competitive Education System
 
 
<Three idiots>, an Indian film with many laughs and tears, was released last summer and won overwhelmingly positive responses. The background of the movie is the extremely competitive and prestigious Imperial College of Engineering in India. The dean of the college announces that life is a race and that if the students do not run fast enough, they will get trampled. He further advises students to become like a cookoo bird that smashes other eggs in the nest as soon as it hatches. The gist of his message is to compete or die.  True to his motto, one of the most creative-minded students commits suicide, since his imaginative idea was rejected and he was not able to complete the project by the dead line. The protagonist, Rancho, who is the only free soul in this cookoo's nest, says to the dean that the student's death is not a suicide but a murder by too much pressure in the competitive education system. He further criticizes the education system, which turns students mindless memorizing machines without any passion for learning science, competing only for good grades to obtain a lucrative job and high social status. This scene may have reminded many Korean viewers of the tragic deaths of four students in KAIST last spring. The pressure of fierce competition and KAIST's penalty tuition system were blamed for taking the precious lives of students. Tweeters called the penalty tuition system 'the systematized madness' that attempted to turn students only 'study machines.' They accused Doctor Suh Nam-Pyo, president of KAIST, of blackmailing students with tuition. Rancho might have argued that the students' consecutive deaths were not actually suicides but murders, perpetrated by the education system that values grades rather than creativity, talents, passion and potential. Nowadays, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Education seems to emulate the KAIST way by giving some universities bad grades, based on a handful of arbitrary indexes, and pushing them into the more intense competitive education system with the pressure from impending budget cuts. Recent researches, however, show that cooperative systems produce a higher creativity and productivity than competitive ones both in education and in companies. A variety of disciplines such as sociology, psychology, neuro-science, and even economics since the 90s, have focused on the benefits of cooperation and altruism in the survival of human beings as a species, while indicating the limitation, and even baneful effects of competition. Therefore, it is a cooperative, not competitive, education system, that will truly turn out to be beneficial to society in the long run.