Canada Experience

South Korea’s educational policy encourages its citizens to be highly-skilled individuals with a global mindset and being unable to meet such criteria is directly related to unemployment. Therefore, parents strive to build their children outstanding resumes from early on. Their effort is reflected in statistics like steadily increasing number of Korean international students studying abroad. However, this social trend is currently posing serious problems as children who have studied abroad come back to Korea with not only confined sense to their national identity but also ____.

I believe that I am the precedent illustrating the standing point of Korea’s current educational system. My parents thought that it was compulsory to speak English and thus, in 1990, I came to study in Canada. It was hard to fit in to new surroundings because there was a great discrepancy in between the life that I had back in Korea and that in Canada. The author, Tayla Zemach-Bersin, of the article “American Students Abroad Can’t Be ‘Global Citizens’” has mentioned his difficulties in adapting to the Tibetan society because entire society treated him as a white advantaged American. I believe that I was the contrary case. I went to an elementary school where most of my classmates were composed of Caucasians and despite my effort to adjust, being unable to speak English fluently approached as a great obstacle. Whenever my classmates seemed to make comments on me, I interpreted it as an act of discrimination. I specifically became afraid of circumstances such as doing group projects or having to stay in front of the class and do a presentation. Such experience has in fact altered my personality as I became timid and disheartened in doing anything. This was the first moment in which I was ashamed of my lack of fluency in English and felt disadvantaged to be an Asian. I felt reluctant in making Koreans friends because my parents said befriending Koreans will only bring a status quo in your...