She was also shocked and confused by issues surrounding gender and language, with every class asking students to announce their preferred pronouns.
“English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”
“It was chaos,” said Yeonmi. “It felt like the regression in civilization.”
“Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she admitted. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”
Really, go read the rest of it:
With the help of Christian missionaries, the pair managed to flee to Mongolia, walking across the Gobi Desert to eventually find refuge in South Korea.
In 2015 she published her memoir “In Order to Live,” where she described what it took to survive in one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships and the harrowing journey to freedom.
“The people here are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most,” the human right activist said.
She accused American higher education institutions of stripping people’s ability to think critically.
I think I’ll link to this in random Guardian comments. Everyone in the, so far, free world should read this.
I wonder how long it will take the FBI and Homeland Security to determine that this brave young woman is an illegal immigrant and deport her to Pyonyang.
“North Korean defector says ‘even North Korea was not this nuts’ after attending Ivy League school”
But both are about *state*. Same as why railways and the NHS are as useless as British Leyland was.
Government funds universities, so universities echo the views of government. If government stopped funding English courses, they would soon become about English rather than indoctrination. The people doing history videos on YouTube, funded by people putting money in their own pockets are not at all woke.
Bloke on M4
Absolutely on the money – all this would not be possible without state funding. There would be limited private demand for any of these ideologies
This has become a documentary
She accused American higher education institutions of stripping people’s ability to think critically.
This, as the cool kids say, is a feature, not a bug.
@Van_Patten, to add to that, there would be no black studies courses and Kehinde Andrews would be flipping burgers.
the pair managed to flee to Mongolia, walking across the Gobi Desert to eventually find refuge in South Korea
Being of a navigational turn of mind I took a look at a map and asked myself, “WTF were they doing to find themselves walking across the Gobi Desert?”
Unless there is a very, very convincing answer, for me, that destroys any credibility the woman might have.
The north-east corner of the Gobi does cross a straight line between North Korea and Mongolia. map. But it does sound a little odd, the geography is deceptive that far out.
If you walk out of North Korea with the intent to not get caught (and returned to NK with prejudice) by the authorities of the friendly neighbour whose territory you are walking across you might not walk in a straight line?
jgh, thanks. The documentary was great.
The story says she and her mother escaped across the (frozen) Yalu, where they were sold into slavery. The trip across the Gobi was to escape to Mongolia, and then from there they were able to get to S Korea.
@VP
“Absolutely on the money – all this would not be possible without state funding. There would be limited private demand for any of these ideologies”
But we see it happen in high prestige, private US colleges. So there’s no doubt it can take over a campus without state funding.
Why would there be private demand? There often is demand to keep up with the latest fashions. To spend serious money being lectured about Austen or Bronte without learning the modern take on such authors will risk you appearing ignorant and backwards, as this lady experienced when she admitted her unironic enjoyment of them. It marks you out as low status. A big part of the point of university is to find ways to get marked as high status. If you don’t know what opinions you are allowed or encouraged to express in “polite society” you’re bound to put your foot in it – no good for you or your career. Knowing the fashionable topics to say you’re passionate about driving change for, being able to couch that in the correct terminology – now an edifice of linguistic changes that the uninformed struggle with, as this lady did with pronouns – regarding gender, race, sexuality, justice, inequity etc is becoming essential in pursuing a high-status career or being recognised as a ‘leader’.
Truth is even a hundred years ago, or even a few decades ago, the financial benefit – if any – of a literature degree was always about the status and becoming part of the in-group, particularly when fewer went to uni. It was never the case that accumulating knowledge about long-dead poets so you could deploy this info in later life was the main causal mechanism that drove higher graduate wages. It hardly matters that the signals the young need to learn to deploy flawlessly to enter today’s in-group are a bit weird and likely to be short-lived – will probably be radically different in two decades time and tomorrow’s fad most likely no more sensible than today’s. There’s still a premium for being able to navigate the bounds of modern employers’ sensibilities and some people will be prepared to pay to acquire it.