Worthiness is a Birthright

In every aspect of our lives, we are always asking ourselves, how am I of value?  what is my worth?  Yet I believe that worthiness is our birthright.

     Oprah Winfrey

Here’s an excerpt from a December 2011 article – “The One-Shot Society” – in the Economist that caught our attention:

ON NOVEMBER 10th South Korea went silent. Aircraft were grounded. Offices opened late. Commuters stayed off the roads. The police stood by to deal with emergencies among the students who were taking their university entrance exams that day.

Every year the country comes to a halt on the day of the exams, for it is the most important day in most South Koreans’ lives. The single set of multiple-choice tests that students take that day determines their future. Those who score well can enter one of Korea’s best universities, which has traditionally guaranteed them a job-for-life as a high-flying bureaucrat or desk warrior at a chaebol (conglomerate). Those who score poorly are doomed to attend a lesser university or no university at all. They will then have to join a less prestigious firm and, since switching employers is frowned upon, may be stuck there for the rest of their lives. Ticking a few wrong boxes, then, may mean that they are permanently locked out of the upper tier of Korean society.

Making so much depend on an exam has several advantages for Korea …

Korea’s well-educated, hard-working population has powered its economic miracle. The country has risen from barefoot to broadband since 1960, and last year, despite the global slowdown, its economy grew by 6.2%. In the age of the knowledge economy, education is economic destiny. So the system has had far-reaching and beneficial consequences.

Yet it also has huge costs. For a start, high school is hell. Two months before the day of his exams Kim Min-sung, a typical student, was monosyllabic and shy. All the joy seemed to have been squeezed out of him, to make room for facts. His classes lasted from 7am until 4pm, after which he headed straight for the library until midnight. He studied seven days a week. “You get used to it,” he mumbled …

… Such expectations can be stressful. In one survey a fifth of Korean middle and high school students said they felt tempted to commit suicide. In 2009 a tragic 202 actually did so. The suicide rate among young Koreans is high: 15 per 100,000 15-24-year-olds, compared with ten Americans, seven Chinese and five Britons.

I (Tom) had a friend in high school who moved into our school district from South Korea.  I remember him describing that “cutthroat” academic environment that he had come from.  My friend described this environment as oppressive.  Everything was about preparing for this one exam.  And students who weren’t the best academic scholars would often simply give up.  Those students came to realize very early in their lives that they didn’t have a shot in their society of being successful or of being valued.  They learned an early lesson that often kept them oppressed for the rest of their lives.   They learned, essentially, that their value and worth were based solely on the results of this one exam.  Very little else seemed to matter in their society.

And it’s not just in Asian cultures either, by any means.  This is just one example. It exists all around the world in too many cultures its own ways.  The world places such a high value on what people do, what they produce, what their title is or their zip code or the length of their resume, that we devalue those who don’t have certain “preferred” credentials.

We, of course, believe in hard work, great education, striving to achieve a better society and making a positive difference in the world.

But we also believe, much more strongly, that a person is of value not just based on what he or she produces or achieves but on the very essence of his or her being.

That we are human is of value enough.

It is part of our mission to remind people of that.  It is our mission to help us all understand something that is counter-cultural – that our worth is not dependent on one exam, the ranking of our school, the size of our bank accounts, the amount of square footage in our homes, the number of activities that take up our time or the number of Facebook “friends” we have.

It is our mission to say to everyone that worthiness is our birthright and that we are worthy, just because we are human, which simply in itself makes us worthy of love.

Photo by Bacila Vlad on Unsplash