정치평론 실전연습 = Practicing Political Criticism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

I have been opening “Political Criticism: Theory & Practice,” an undergraduate course in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy, Yeungnam University, for the last ten years. This course introduces students to political criticism and trains them in speaking and writing by exercising criticism on various political issues. The goal of the course is to help students articulate their own views on political issues and put their thoughts into words and letters. It helps, I hope, students prepare for actual political criticism by exercising writing and speaking on political issues. Introducing the course in this paper, I wish to get my fellow scholars to think together about the desirable future of our discipline. The main activities in the course include: selecting the best criticism and the worst criticism; writing about oneself including self-introduction, self-recommendation, and self-obituary; cultural criticism such as movie criticism, literary criticism, and book review; criticism on current political or social issues; editing a collection of political criticisms; reading the Korean society with key words; dialogue with senior students or graduates who previously took the course, etc. I would like to emphasize a couple of lessons that I got from the experience of opening the course. First, we should be ready to learn from each other. The teachers should not try to teach students unilaterally. Students and teachers should learn from each other. Students could learn from other students much better than from teachers. Second, students with low degree of academic performance may have good talents other than academic learning. I saw a high level of “sensitivity,” quite different from “intellectual capability,” in those students who did quite well in exercising political criticism. Hence the need to enhance the sensitivity of students by learning and practicing political criticism.