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Kim Dong-choon, a professor of sociology at Songkonghoe University, speaks to the press about his new book “Test Meritocracy” on May 31. (Im In-tack/The Hankyoreh)

“As exemplified by [South Korean President] Yoon Suk-yeol and [Minister of Justice] Han Dong-hoon, this is the first time we’ve seen people pass the state civil service examination and work in the legal world before going straight to the presidency. Since democratization, ‘test-based meritocracy’ has progressed to become a ground for political power.”

For the past several years, there has been a hard-fought effort to reflect on South Korea’s version of “meritocracy” and establish a discourse surrounding it — but that push now seems to have been thwarted by the arrival of a new administration under President Yoon Suk-yeol. That administration has fully internalized meritocracy, to the point where it has proclaimed it as a core principle behind its appointment decisions.

While the new book “Test-Based Meritocracy” (Changbi Publishers) by sociologist Kim Dong-choon is a continuation of that critical discourse, it also sends the message that a new, bolder approach is needed in this new era.

A professor of sociology at Sungkonghoe University, Kim spoke with reporters at the Changbi Seogyo Building in Seoul’s Mapo District on Tuesday morning in a roundtable for the book’s publication.

“Education in South Korea is a battle not to become a ‘laborer,’” he explained.

“The principle of test-based meritocracy operates and is promoted to an excessive degree among the elite, and there are also mechanisms behind it where people support and favor those people [who demonstrate their merit through test scores],” he added.

“That’s because there is an aspect of labor exclusion [behind it],” he said.

Going a step farther than past critical discourse on meritocracy — which characterizes it as a “trap that makes losers out of everyone” — the book sees the fundamental backdrop behind its intensification as lying in the alienation of labor and employment crisis that followed the bailout from the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.

In his assessment, the system represents an ideology and clear ruling order, where university entrance examinations represent the first stage of selection, followed by a second stage made up of company entrance examinations. The system functions to distinguish a small number of successful candidates (who are viewed as “competent”) from the vast majority who are not successful (viewed as “incompetent”), and to encourage the adoption of these distinctions, he explains.

In effect, it becomes difficult to understand meritocracy or devise alternatives without seeing the multilayered relationship between education and labor — where the “cumulative effects” of the first selection stage essentially turn education into a means to the examination end, with employment rendered insecure and schools turned into a battleground to avoid becoming “cheap labor.”

“The reason we’re so fixated on examinations is that it’s difficult to find an alternative, equitable procedure,” he explained, pointing to distrust in South Korean society as another factor underpinning test-based meritocracy.

This is the result of South Koreans witnessing example after example of privilege being passed down through generations, as seen with the scandal involving former Justice Minister Cho Kuk or the recent issues surrounding the education of current Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon’s daughter. The problems with test-based meritocracy relate to “educational issues that cannot be solved, no matter how much we might tinker with the entrance examination system,” Kim argues.

Presenting itself as a “scholarly social critique,” the book focuses on possible alternative approaches. They include institutional reforms such as greater diversity in assessment, efforts to weaken the hierarchical university structure, and reducing overconcentration in the greater Seoul area; structural reforms such as easing monopolies on positions, respecting labor, and overcoming wage inequality; and value reforms such as critiquing and transcending the “ideology of meritocracy.”

South Korea’s younger generations still seem to be following along with test-based meritocratic beliefs, while conservative administrations have adopted them as a keynote. This is why Kim continues to rail against South Korea’s version of meritocracy, even as he acknowledges that his critical discourse “might be all for nothing.”

“I started preparing five years ago. I was so deeply disappointed with the Moon Jae-in administration’s education policies,” he explains in the book’s introduction.

“Education has been a highly political issue from the start, and it is a matter of whom we distribute the ‘good’ positions in Korea to and how. Yet I have observed a strategy of sorts among Korea’s elites where they ignore that point and try to limit education to a matter of entrance examinations alone, as well as a tendency for [the Moon administration] to avoid the crux of the issue even though they were aware of it,” he writes.

In closing, he adds, “On the flip side of our test-based meritocracy is the tremendous suffering experienced by young people. It would be criminal for the older generations to leave that unaddressed.”

By Im In-tack, staff reporter

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