Netflix's 'True Education' is a hit — but Robert Walser's 1909 novel asks if unlearning matters more

Netflix's True Education (참교육) is drawing viewers. A Seoul culture columnist saw an opening to ask something harder.

On July 1, 오경진 (Oh Kyung-jin)—a reporter and literary critic in the Culture and Sports Department—set the drama against Robert Walser's Swiss novel Benjamenta Institute (원제: Jakob von Gunten), published in 1909. The pairing works.

Walser's narrator doesn't mince words about what the school delivers: "We learn almost nothing here. There are no teachers teaching us. For us, the students of the Benjamenta Academy, learning will be of no use anyway." It gets darker. "We will all live as very insignificant beings in the future, beings enslaved to someone."

Walser frames this smallness as honest, not broken. "In any case, we must be small beings. We must know precisely that we are not great."

True Education pulls the opposite direction. Its protagonist draws a line in the classroom: "Those trying to be above the teacher, those treating the teacher as a plaything, those making the teacher a spectacle rather than an object of respect — from now on, I will regard these as violations of teacher authority."

Oh's column also invokes a soldier reduced to mechanism. "Merely a very small part of a machine with a grand plan, no longer human." Military discipline strips away memory of parents, homeland, personal hope, leaving "a solid, impenetrable, almost empty body" marching toward Moscow.

One education produces enforcers. The other asks you to stop needing to win.

The piece runs under the series title 폐허에서 무한으로 (From Ruin to Infinity) on seoul.co.kr.