Post-122: School Names in South Korea vs. The USA

Writing post-121, about a Korean high school’s slogan (“Growing Hope and Pleasure”) made me realize something.

Korean School Names
The school’s name in post-121, Jung-Heung [중흥], translates as “the Center of Joy” (a name probably mocked regularly by its students). Jung means center, and heung means “interest, fun, pleasure, joy, amusement…”, according to my dictionary. Korean schools all seem to have names like this. They are either highly abstract, or tied directly to the local place. For example, there is a Songnae High School near, believe it or not, Songnae Train Station.

USA School Names
Naming schools after people or after specific (non-local) places of historical of “patriotic” interest is the way schools are named in the USA. At least, that’s true in the part of the USA in which I am most familiar with school names (Northern Virginia).

My home of Arlington, VA has three regular public high schools. The origins of their names:

• One is named “Yorktown”, an early colonial capital and later Revolutionary War battlefield, at which the British finally surrendered to George Washington.
• Another is named after George Washington and Robert E. Lee,
• The third is named after George Washington’s birthplace, “Wakefield“.

A Different Arlington
Actually, until now I hadn’t realized that all three Arlington high school names were tied to George Washington. I wonder if that was intentional when they were named in the early-mid 1900s. I doubt the people at the helm in today’s Arlington would do something like that. First of all, those places are all Virginia-centric. Arlington people don’t think of themselves as Southerners at all. Included in the mix is even General Lee, the very archetype of Old Southern gentility.

If the current leaders of Arlington had the task of naming new schools, I can only imagine what they’d come up with.

It reminds me of a line from Bonfire of the Vanities [1987]. The Mayor says:

“[The Black Episcopalian Bishop] coulda just as easy been a woman or a Sandinista. Or a lesbian. Or a lesbian Sandinista“!

There was a case in the 1990s when an Arlington school, named “Stonewall Jackson Elementary” (after the now-mythical general of the Civil War on the losing side) was renamed something boring and pitifully bland: “Arlington Traditional School”.  Robert E. Lee’s and Stonewall Jackson’s had slaves, so their military heroes are all definitely evil, was the cockamamie theory at work there, I think. Hey, guys, Washington and Jefferson and others also had slaves, right? Should we tear down their memorials? …..Anyway, Arlingtonians today don’t identify with at all with the South.

There was also a Page Elementary School, also renamed in the 1990s. I don’t know what ol’ Mr. Page, whoever he was, did to deserve his name being purged.