How Busan Grows Its People

18 Questions for Next Busan · Day 14 of 18 · Gray (Kim Hyunseung) · 2026

What School Kills

In 2006, in what became the most-watched TED talk ever, Ken Robinson left one sentence behind. We don't grow into creativity, we get educated out of it.

School teaches us to fear being wrong. It places subjects with right answers at the top and those without at the bottom. It certifies those who follow the standard path and drops those outside it. Robinson's diagnosis is twenty years old, but it cuts deeper now. What he called educated out of us — the power to ask on your own, to begin on your own, to hold on to a problem with no answer — has become exactly the most scarce thing today.

The claim of this essay is simple. In an age when teaching has become cheap, what a city must grow is not teaching but the will to do something oneself. And the will cannot be taught — it grows only where there is a place to grow.

When teaching became cheap

Teaching is nearly free now. Ask, and an answer comes in seconds. A person's knowledge, skills, and record are analyzed and scored by a machine instantly. The work of transmitting knowledge — what schools have done for a hundred years — is rapidly losing its value.

So what has become scarce sits on the opposite side. The power to decide for yourself what to ask, to begin what no one assigned, to keep holding when no answer appears. The cheaper teaching becomes — the more precious what cannot be taught.

Busan is not bad at growing talent

It is not that Busan cannot grow talent. Busan has produced actors and singers, baseball players and martial artists, corporate executives and university professors. In some fields it has put out more names than one city would seem able to.

And one thing stands out. The fields where Busan excelled are mostly what school does not teach. Acting, singing, sport, fighting. There is no answer sheet; you cannot reach them without digging in on your own. Busan did not teach these people into being. It simply did not block those who wanted to do something themselves. In the space it left unblocked, people with will grew on their own.

Then the question becomes clear. If talent emerges in the fields that aren't taught, why not in the fields of building and making — startups, technology, industry? It is not that Busan's young lack ability. As in acting and sport, people with the will exist in those fields too. There is simply no place for them to grow in Busan. So they leave the city to find that place. That the people it raised cannot stay in Busan is not a problem of ability, but of a place to grow. (The problem of leaving itself we take up later.)

Taught nothing, yet they grow

There is a case of someone who built such a place. A school in Paris called École 42. It has no teachers. No textbooks, no fixed class hours. Each day a project is given, students must figure it out themselves, and peers do the grading.

The founder looks at just two things for admission — logic and motivation. Criminal record, bad at math, none of it matters. Though nothing is taught, about 80% of this school's students land jobs before they even finish. The point is simple. They reduced teaching and increased places to do things oneself, and people grew.

Of course this is not a cure-all. Will alone does not achieve everything. But one thing École 42 proved is clear. What a city, or a school, can do is not to teach people into being, but to build the places where those with the will can grow.

Where the will grows

So what can Busan do? It cannot teach will. Will is not injected. But the places where will grows can be built.

Places where starting something yourself is welcomed. Places where you can try again after failing. Places where holding on to a problem with no answer is not seen as strange. Places where the person off the standard path is taken in rather than passed over. Just as Busan produced talent in acting and sport by not blocking — if it would not block in the fields of building and making either, and went further to build the places to grow.

This is hard to measure. It is not caught by counts of lectures, graduates, or certificates. But in an age when teaching has become cheap, the one thing a city can grow is this — a place where those with the will can grow without leaving Busan.

And those with the will cannot go far alone, either. Beside one person with will, there must be another. How do they meet? The next question.

18 Questions for Next Busan Day 14 of 18 · Gray (Kim Hyunseung)