NOGOK,
South Korea — The post office pulled up stakes and moved away years
ago. The police station is long gone. And so is the bank. Over the
years, the residents of Nogok have watched almost every major
institution disappear, victims of an exodus of young people that is
emptying villages and towns across much of rural South Korea.
Now,
Nogok is about to lose an important symbol of youthful vitality: Next
spring, the local primary school will close when its only student, a
12-year-old named Chung Jeong-su, graduates.
“Villages
around here have no more children to send,” the school’s only teacher,
Lee Sung-kyun, said recently, looking over an empty, weed-filled
playground surrounded by old cherry trees. “Young people have all gone
to cities to find work and get married there.”
Nogok,
which lies 110 miles east of Seoul, is typical of many rural South
Korean towns. An idyllic cluster of 16 hamlets, it is nestled in a
series of narrow valleys surrounded by lush hills. In the hills and
valleys, farmers tend crops of potatoes, beans and red peppers; in town,
persimmon and apricot trees grow in the well-tended gardens of every
home. But the town also bears scars from the country’s rapid
industrialization, a great transformation that places like Nogok helped
unleash.
CHINA
100 Miles
Sea of
Japan
NORTH
KOREA
Seoul
Nogok
SOUTH
KOREA
Yellow
Sea
JAPAN
Korea Strait
Pacific
Ocean
East China Sea
And the primary school itself played a large part in those changes.
Like
countless other parents in the aftermath of the Korean War, the
slash-and-burn farmers of Nogok saw education as the ticket for their
children to escape lives of backbreaking work and poverty. Every
morning, they would send them to study at Nogok Primary, with some of
the children walking as many as five miles each way.
Later,
the children joined streams of rural youths migrating to cities to seek
higher education or factory jobs from the 1970s and onward, providing
cheap and disciplined work forces to fuel the economy.
Many children from Nogok Primary, for instance, moved on to work as welders and painters at shipyards on the southern coast of South Korea, earning wages their fathers could hardly have imagined as they toiled on their hardscrabble plots in the hills around Nogok.
This
exodus also overlapped with a government birth-control campaign that
started in the 1960s and continued into the 1990s. In Nogok, married men
reporting for mandatory army reserve training would receive condoms or
exemptions from serving if they agreed to free vasectomies. Across South
Korea, birthrates dropped from 4.5 children per woman in 1970 to 1.2
last year, one of the lowest rates in the world. Over the same period,
the number of primary school students decreased by more than half to 2.7
million.
Hardest
hit by this demographic shift were rural towns like Nogok and their
public schools. Since 1982, nearly 3,600 schools have closed across
South Korea, most of them in rural towns, for lack of children.
Today,
many villages look like ghost towns, with houses crumbling and
once-bustling schools standing in weedy ruins, windowpanes cracked or
full of cobwebs. In Nogok, the only store in the town center was closed
during a recent visit in the afternoon.
“There
are only old, useless people left here,” said Baek Gye-hyun, 55, a
farmer here. “If we come across a young woman with a child, we stop and
stare as if they were an endangered species.”
In
1960, Nogok had 5,387 people, 2,054 of them age 12 or younger. In 2010,
the last year the government conducted a general census, the town
reported a population of 615. Only 17 were 14 or younger.
Jeong-su,
the Nogok Primary student, is the youngest child, and his 52-year-old
father, Chung Eui-jin, the youngest married man in their village of
Hawolsan-ri, which is part of Nogok. The school has not had a first
grader since Jeong-su enrolled there five years ago. After two sixth
graders graduated this spring, he was the only student left.
“It’s
cool to have all the school to myself,” said Jeong-su, a shy boy with
glasses, who said he wanted to become a veterinarian.
When asked what he would remember the most from his school days, he mentioned playing table tennis with his teacher, Mr. Lee.
Mr.
Lee said the personalized attention was obviously good for Jeong-su.
But he said he felt bad that the boy had no classmates with whom to
share school memories later in life.
“Until
last year, when we had several students, we used to play mini-soccer,”
he said, referring to a stripped down version of the game for small
numbers of players. “Now, that has become impossible.” At recess, Mr.
Lee said, he and Jeong-su now spent their time throwing paper airplanes.
Most
South Koreans now live in the tall apartment buildings that are spread
out like dominoes across South Korean cities, but many still bemoan the
shrinking of rural communities. The slow death of rural schools is
particularly poignant in a culture that cherishes hometown and school
ties.
Even
decades after leaving rural hometowns, many urban migrants stay
connected through “dongchanghoe,” or school alumni associations, whose
bonds are so strong that politicians often use them as vote-gathering
tools.
“It’s
a sorry sight,” said Mr. Baek, a graduate of Nogok Primary, pointing at
the weeds in the school’s playground. “When I was a student here, 300
children were crawling all over there, giving weeds no time to grow.”
In
1990, for the 60th anniversary of the school, graduates pooled money to
build statues of an elephant and a lion, as well as a monument that
urges students to nurture their “dreams into the future, into the
world.” But by 1999, the school had lost so many students it became a
branch of another school, Geundeok Primary School, in the nearby town.
Today, the monument stands forlorn, overlooking a basketball hoop,
slides and soccer goal posts rusting in the school field.
Inside the two-story concrete school building, it is oddly silent.
The
wooden floors creaked when Jeong-su, Mr. Lee and the school’s janitor,
Lee Dong-min, walked in on a recent school day. Walls lined with crayon
drawings and origami created by former students bore witness to a busier
past.
Gathering
dust in empty classrooms were big-screen TVs, table tennis tables,
computers, a drum set, a piano, telescopes, anatomical charts,
book-filled shelves, and desks and chairs, all empty.
Painting
and guitar instructors visit the school twice a week to give Jeong-su
lessons. A yellow van operated by the local educational office delivers
lunch for the boy and his teacher.
It cost more than 100 million won (about $87,000) a year to run the school, Mr. Lee said.
“You can’t say all the excess is justified by one student,” said Kim Bok-hyun, 71, a Nogok villager.
Mr.
Kim used to sell pencils, gum and toys to Nogok Primary students from a
shop in front of the school. But he closed up years ago because of a
lack of customers. He now spends most of his time sitting on a chair on
the roadside, watching the few buses and trucks that pass by.
Some
rural towns started campaigns to save their schools, hiring buses to
transport children from neighboring towns and even offering free housing
for couples moving in with school-age children.
Similar efforts did not work for Nogok, said Kim Jong-sik, 58, a village chief in the area.
“There
is no one coming in to live here, only people moving out,” said Mr.
Kim, who said all his own children lived in cities. “With all the best
schools, jobs and shopping malls concentrated in big cities, their
attraction for young people has become irreversible.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 10, 2015, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: As South Korean Villages Empty, Even Primary Schools Fall Silent .
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