No Distinction of Classes

Today is the great annual day of the South Korean university entrance examination. 80 per cent of young South Koreans now go to university, leaving graduates unemployed while skilled trade positions and low-skilled jobs remain unfilled, the first because graduates have not been trained to do them, the second because they are too far up themselves to do them.

All of this is most un-Confucian, and raises serious questions about whether cultural Westernisation is always a good thing, especially when it is being led by what the Anglosphere has become in its decadent dotage. The skilled tradesman or indeed the manual labourer has nobility in himself, provided that he cultivate himself as a jūnzǐ, part of which is doing his job well, whatever it might be. That he should also be well-educated and cultured, in whatever station, is also part and parcel of that process.

In their own ways, both the grammar schools and the Secondary Moderns imbued this sense and sensibility, although the absence of the promised technical schools always stood in the way of the full necessary progress. But we have now lost it entirely in Britain, and instead gone sharply into reverse. If the rising power really is Germany, then she could do a lot worse than to spread far and wide this particular aspect of her own culture, contemporary no less than historical. Even as far as Korea, Japan and the mighty China, where it urgently needs to be rediscovered.