Why South Koreans are richer than Latin Americans

(Photo: Ahn Young-joon – AP)

If you wonder why most Asian countries have done so much better than Latin American nations in recent decades, I strongly recommend that you do what I did during a trip to South Korea — visit a local school.

I spent a recent afternoon at the Seoul Robotics High School, a vocational school where students learn to build and operate robots, as part of my research for a forthcoming book on automation and the future of jobs.

I had long known, from visiting similar schools in China and Singapore in recent years, that Asian youths study much harder than their Latin American counterparts.

But visiting the 455-student, state-run robotics school was a powerful reminder of why South Korea has become so much richer than Latin America. South Korea is as beset by political corruption scandals as most Latin American countries — its recent president Park Geun-hye was put in jail last week — and was as underdeveloped as the poorest Latin American nations only five decades ago. And yet its attitude toward education has been markedly different from Latin America’s.

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