A year ago, my coworker-friend C.H. (an American in his 30s from California), quit his job, partly due to frustration with the above. In his final weeks, C.H. eagerly recommended this TED talk to students. I saw it as akin to the good-guy in a movie shooting wildly into the distance as he is running away from the bad-guys: He’s hoping to score some hits, yes, but the shooting may be mostly for his own satisfaction: “I fought the good fight and did the best I could”.
That TED Talk would really deserve the adjective “subversive” applied to it, when within the context of Korean education. C.H. knew it, too.
Maybe another, more precise analogy could be an outgoing McDonald’s manager handing out copies of “Supersize Me” to all customers in his final weeks. If everyone actually took the message of that documentary to heart, the McDonald’s model would fall apart.