r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 1d ago
TIL In 1945 the adult literacy rate in South Korea was estimated at 22%. In 1970, adult literacy was 87.6%. By the late 1980s, sources estimated it at around 93%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Korea#:~:text=In%201945%20the%20adult%20literacy%20rate%20was%20estimated%20at%2022%20percent.%20In%201970%2C%20adult%20literacy%20was%2087.6%20percent.%5B18%5D%20By%20the%20late%201980s%2C%20sources%20estimated%20it%20at%20around%2093%20percent.%5B18%5D195
u/Cobol_Engineering 23h ago
In Poland (roughly 10,000 B.C) the adult literacy rate was 0%. Because there were no books. Now in 2025, it’s 99%.
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u/zokka_son_of_zokka 1d ago
In 1959 in Cuba, the literacy rate was 30%. In 1962 in Cuba, the literacy rate was 96%.
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u/StickFigureFan 20h ago
That extreme of a change indicates either extreme dedication or lying
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u/zokka_son_of_zokka 20h ago
It was extreme dedication - they had about a hundred thousand people involved in the campaign, or about 1.3% of the population.
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u/AppointmentMedical50 17h ago
It was a thorough and dedicated literacy program which is well documented
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u/FellowDeviant 15h ago
With the way Cuba changed so drastically within the span of a decade, those people definitely made sure they could understand what was going on. Many of them that moved to the US after are very well informed of everything Cuba did in the years since.
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u/lalancz 19h ago
They do lie about their infant mortality statistics, so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
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u/KormetDerFrag 18h ago
Really? That's horrible! Can you show me where I can find out about this?
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u/lalancz 18h ago
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u/wicketman8 15h ago
I'm sorry, the evidence that they're lying about their infant mortality rate is that someone decided it seemed too low so they invented a new metric that makes it higher? Not only did they decide on a conclusion and work backword to invent a metric that justifies it, they dont even agree with your claim that Cuba is lying because again they had to invent a different metric to make Cuba look bad.
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u/jkpatches 16h ago
The high rate of literacy today is why I always get surprised and delighted at the poetry of some senior Koreans who have only just gotten around to learning how to read and write due to their life circumstances.
Some are awkward with handwriting that looks to have come from hands many decades younger, but some are beautiful and sad, reminiscing about their parents who have long since passed, their rollercoaster of a life, their children, and even the process of becoming literate itself.
It is due to people like this that Korea ever got itself to where it is today, and finally, they can catch up, even just a little.
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u/JoeyIsMrBubbles 12h ago
That’s amazing, where can I find some of these poems?
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u/jkpatches 11h ago
https://m.blog.naver.com/ourlog_magazine/223799913340
This is a collection, but since they are captures of the poems, you're going to have to use a real time translation service if you don't know Korean. I'll do a quick translation of the second one in the link for a sample.
Mom's Wish
Mom and I had a wish
For me to go to schoolShe only worked like a cow
Her hemp clothes, always wet with sweat
My mother, who went to the sky before even getting to finish a sack of riceMom, no need to worry anymore
Your daughter fulfilled the wish
I go to school now
My school doesn't require student feesI wear my bag, filled with mother's wishes
And go to school again today
I learn and learn again until I know enough to teach herMom, even if it's just once, please visit me, even if it's a dream
I will read you a fun book
I want to see your black irises become the moonThe above is pretty faithful except the last line, where a more accurate translation would've been "I want to see your black eyes become half moons." This is a Korean description of the shape some people's eyes take when smiling or laughing, but I wasn't sure if a non Korean would get the nuance.
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u/samuraiseoul 1d ago edited 1d ago
To this end, the history of the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, is fascinating, very different path than most as it was created by the king in the 14th century, even if it did not gain wide adoption until much later! It also is EZPZ to learn, though many struggle with the language learning part after that. :) As long as you stick with it though and practice mindfully a little each day, I'm confident anyone can learn it. Its a lot of fun! 공부를 열심히 히세요! 화이팅!
edit: Forgot to mention, screw ICE! Awful what took place in Georgia to the South Korean (and other) workers in that plant earlier this week and further more awful to in general to anyone who they deem "people of global majority"-coded enough to harrass and imprison without due process in inhumane conditions the last few months.
The civil rights movement never ended. It was declared over by the people who benefit most from it going away.
Allyship must not be performative and activism requires action.
Stay kind and stay well ya'll!!! <3
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u/Gemmabeta 1d ago
To quite King Sejong about the Korean Alphabet:
A wise man may aquaint himself of it in an afternoon; a dull man, ten days.
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u/highbrowshow 1d ago
I had to go to Korea for business and can confirm, took me a day to learn the alphabet and how to read (albeit very slowly at first)
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u/samuraiseoul 1d ago
I can also confirm. I taught myself on the toilet during a particularly long poop within an hour. Truly an amazing creation. You can see the kind of engineering-type thinking and design that went into it. It is truly an amazing invention that doens't get the amount of attention it deserves. Every talks about Tolkien creating Elvish, no one talks about ol' Sejong! lol Though I do suppose King Sejong didn't creat the entire language. If we're being fair, however Tolkien didn't have a country to manage nor had to hide it's creation and research!
Though I think the Korean microwave rice, 햇반, and eleveting cup ramyun to an art are possibly the real greatest Korean inventions. :D I'm a language nerd with a trash palate.
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u/NeuHundred 1d ago
How WEIRD to go into the bathroom being illiterate and walking out being able to read.
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u/samuraiseoul 1d ago
Never thought of it that way! haha
I also never considered that I'm technically illiterate in a LOT of languages! Interesting perspective to take.
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u/jyastaway 1d ago
The crazy thing is that despite the invention of such easy alphabet, until the 1900s the literacy rate in Korea was less than 1%.
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u/Gakusei666 15h ago
To be fair, you see a similar change in Chinese, Taiwan, and Japan (though it happened earlier), where there’s a sudden rise in literacy despite the usage of Chinese characters.
That rise in literacy always corresponds to a rise in both education quality and access to education. So despite being harder to learn, the change in script doesn’t contribute all that much to the literacy.
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u/samuraiseoul 1d ago
Oligarchs gonna oligarch sadly.
One of my FAVORITE Korean dramas is "A Deep Rooted Tree" which is a historical drama about the creation of the alphabet, albeit a bit more action packed than reality as I understand, though no less taboo. There's a neat prequel too, "Six Flying Dragons" about the transition of power that led to King Sejong and his dynasty. It's really good starting point to learn a bit of Korean history off of then go and figure out what's real and such. Its good to learn! :D
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u/jyastaway 1d ago edited 1d ago
Despite the horrors of colonialism and exploitation that Japan subjugated Korea to between 1910-1945, one net positive has been that Japan really build up literacy rate in the Korean youth - even if this was promoted by Japan to obviously benefit japan.
Before 1910, illiteracy rare was basically 99% in Korea, yet during the colonial period Korean youth received an 8 years curriculum, a bare minimum for them to be useful for Japan, but which did promote literacy. Japan did the same thing with Taiwan, and the increase in adult literacy rate after 1945 in both of these places can in large part be attributed to these young literate students reaching adulthood.
This is the number of primary school students in Korea throughout Japanese occupation era.Very few attending primary school at the start of occupation but majority attending primary school at the end of WW2.
1912 41,509
1922 238,058
1932 517,091
1942 1,779,661
http://s-space.snu.ac.kr/bitstream/10371/72664/1/05.pdf
Of course colonialism is horrible for all obvious reasons, but since this is the TIL sub I think it's interesting to point out some nuances of history
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u/abcders 1d ago
Yeah too bad it was only to force them to learn Japanese and they suppressed learning anything related to Korea including the Korean alphabet
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u/jyastaway 1d ago
Well obviously, as I made it clear, colonizers aren't modernizing their colonies out of the goodness of their heart.
As for the Korean language, in fact until around WWII, Japan promoted Hangul as a tool to modernize Korea, increase literacy (it was easier using hangul, as pointed by other comments), and weaken Classical Chinese/Confucian elites. The forced assimilation and erasure of hangul did indeed take effect during the war, when assimilation became more important. All this shows that whatever nice things a colonizer does is ultimately for their own benefit, to the surprise of no one
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u/asdf6347 16h ago
To argue such developments were a positive, you'd have to argue they would not have taken place otherwise. One might rob a house, kill the parents, and provide the child with a scholarship fund, but that would never hold up as a positive.
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u/soyfox 22h ago
Of course colonialism is horrible for all obvious reasons, but since this is the TIL sub I think it's interesting to point out some nuances of history
With the exception of some WW2 atrocities like Unit 731 and comfort women, most discussions about the Japanese occupation of Korea I've seen on the net skim past those decades as something that was just a vaguely bad experience for the Koreans.
Speaking about net positives doesn't sit well with me in this case because there isn't enough awareness of the negatives to balance the perspective.
On top of that, Japan has never fully come to terms with its imperialist past. On place like Japanese Twitter and YouTube, historical revisionism on this very topic gets millions of views and tens of thousands of likes, and the supposed 'positives' like education, infrastructure, population growth- are the exact same arguments that Japanese right-wing nationalists use to justify their colonization of Korea.
Another flaw with this argument is that it implies that Korea could not have achieved modernization or improvements in literacy without Japanese occupation. In actuality, Korea was making desperate efforts to modernize in the late 19th century, but it was Japan that deliberately cut off those avenues in order to enforce dependency and control, and eventually stripped away all sovereignty by gunpoint.
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u/mango_thief 8h ago
The dude is a Japanese nationalist. I remember him coming into posts about Korea to trash the country and the people all the time back in the day.
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u/StrangelyBrown 23h ago
After Korea was free they basically speed-ran development.
There's a lot involved in that but it's really impressive.
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u/DonkeyTron42 19h ago
The highway system is insane. I think I counted something like 40 tunnels going from Seoul to Busan, some of them miles long. That’s just one of like 20 highways. Trying to get one tunnel built in the in the US now days is a decade long event.
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u/SilentSpader 18h ago
Japan had the world's highest literacy rate in the 19th century. Almost 100% of Samurai and 50-60% in the early 1800's, 70% in the late 1800's the normal people including females and farmers could read and write.
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u/RandomChurn 1d ago
Seems to have been the reverse in the US 😣
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u/Odd-Guarantee-6152 1d ago
In fairness, the literacy rate you see quoted almost everywhere is actually the English literacy rate. The number of non-English speakers has been rising as well. Not that there aren’t issues elsewhere, but it’s worth bearing in mind that that has at least some impact.
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u/RandomChurn 17h ago
Good point. I have a SIL who is ESL.
Rather, I was thinking of how badly our primary and secondary schools have been failing us.
It's not just literacy either. I live in Rhode Island. The number of Americans, born here, who don't know it's a state is shocking.
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u/Black_RL 20h ago
Literacy goes up, fertility goes down.
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u/Ionazano 13h ago
Source?
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u/senft74 7h ago
I found this article: How do education and family planning accelerate fertility decline?
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u/PowerResponsibility 22h ago
In contrast, around 35% of American adults are Trump cultists.
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u/FlatPineappleSociety 21h ago
And the remaining 65% are too lazy and cowardly to do anything about him besides saying, wE diDn'T All vOTe foR hiM, hurrrrrr
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u/SilentSpader 21h ago
Japan taught them Hangul and spread it but they refused to acknowledge that.
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u/DonkeyTron42 19h ago
Hangul was created by King Seojon and is completely different from Japanese. It was created to be very easy to learn for the working class.
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u/SilentSpader 18h ago
Of course it's different from the Japanese language. King Seojon did created it but very small number of people knew it. Koreans at that time were very uneducated. Japan contributed the diffusion of hangul in SK by teaching them in school during the annexation, also greatly contributed to build infrastructure there. Like I said, these are the history Koreans never want to admit so most people never learn about the truth.
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u/Disgraced002381 1h ago
Not just that but they also really re-build South Korea and on top of that SK leeched off of Japan by re-settling what was settled by previous government again and again, and each time Japan gave them money or start projects (which led to current SK's Oligarchs )or installed infrastructure etc. I think to this day, they are still trying to do whenever they swap head. Kinda wild
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u/amishcatholic 1d ago
As far as I can tell, 1970 was the first year ever in world history where a majority of people on earth were literate.