The Environment Matters to Korean Youths
The best way to find out how important the environment is to Korean youths, I thought, is to ask them. Luckily, I happen to know a number of Korean youths: they’re my English students. Ah! A captive audience.
So, I handed out strips of paper to each student and asked them to anonymously mark the answer choice that they agreed with. On the paper were three lines:
- Protecting the environment is very important to me.
- Protecting the environment is a little bit important to me.
- Protecting the environment is not important to me.
The results of the survey are displayed in the accompanying graph.
Forty-four students, age 11-15 took part in this small-scale survey of Korean youth’s opinions of the environment. For statisticians and the curious, the students are mostly from upper-middle class families. They live in Gangneung, the largest city in Gangwon-do, a rural region of Korea that borders the East Sea (A.K.A. the Sea of Japan) on one side and North Korea on another. The city, Gangneung, is thought to hold mostly conservative values; it’s considered a seat of history and tradition in Korea.
Aside from feeling slightly like Jean-Jacques Rousseau for using my students as writing material and study subjects, this was an eye-opening experiment for me. It illustrates the global nature of today’s environmental consciousness. It provides a reason for hope.
With luck, these students will continue to develop their interest in protecting the environment and the natural world. With modern heroes like U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to look up to, they may just turn out to be tomorrow’s environmental leaders.
[...] a good barometer for the evolving environmental consciousness in South Korea. In one very informal survey that I conducted with all 44 of my Korean students, I found that 77% of them said they were [...]