Young N. Koreans face ostracism in South

By Burt Herman

updated 1:03 a.m. ET Jan. 22, 2006

SEOUL, South Korea - Wearing jeans, digital music players dangling from their necks and faces speckled with acne, they look like typical youth in South Korea. Only at this school, the students are all North Korean defectors, and the lessons here are aimed at more than getting good grades — but at integrating them into a new way of life.

The Yeomyung School is one of a handful of small private schools seeking to keep young North Korean defectors from falling through the cracks of society in their new home. Many of the students have dropped out of regular South Korean schools, facing harassment from their peers for their differences and unable to apply lessons they learned in North Korea, where education is focused on churning out devoted followers of the totalitarian regime.

Defectors have flooded to the South in recent years, with a record 1,894 arriving in 2004. South Korea’s Unification Ministry, in charge of North Korean issues, said it supports education for 1,659 defector students aged from 6 to 24 — some 28 percent of all defectors now living in South Korea.

High drop-out rates
Statistics on the problem of how many defectors drop out of school are hard to find, but one civic group surveyed three top universities and found nearly 50 percent of defector students dropped out or were expelled. The group tried to get a more complete survey but a dozen other universities declined to respond to their questions.

“The government has no will to take care of these kids,” said Ma Sok-hun, head of the group Hanul Samter. The dropout rate “is such an embarrassing result.”

The Unification Ministry said it keeps statistics on dropouts but declined to release them, claiming they weren’t completely accurate.

All defectors young and old arriving in South Korea go through a three-month program at a high-security center that aims to give them basic knowledge for living in a capitalist society. Still, children heading back to regular school — sometimes after years off while living in hiding as refugees in China before making it to the South — find they simply can’t keep up.

“At first other children are nice to them but then they bully them in the end,” said Woo Kee-sup, president of Yeomyung School. “Most (defector) students can’t survive at a normal school.”

Realizing the problem, the Unification Ministry said it is planning to set up a transitional school for children next year.

But for now, the organizers of the Yeomyung School say they’re filling a need that the government has been reluctant to acknowledge, providing a lifeline for children defectors since opening in September 2004.

Modern society overwhelming
The North Korean youths have had to cope with famine and economic crisis, and know how to get by with only the basic necessities for life. But Cho Myung-sook, vice president of the Yeomyung School, noted that South Korea’s modern society is simply too complicated for many — with its always-wired technology culture and breakneck development.

“Even youth who have had higher education in North Korea can’t adapt themselves to South Korea,” she said.

Woo said only about 100 students attend special schools like Yeomyung — which administrators said was the largest of four such full-time facilities in South Korea with capacity for 30 youths, who range in age from 17 to 25. Located on a bustling street in a southern Seoul neighborhood, the school takes up two floors of a commercial building with three classrooms, a dining hall and computer center.

Students attend Yeomyung for up to three years, and the school boasts that all seven of its graduates last year were accepted to universities.

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