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Great story in local media about the recent South Korean obsession with the Chavrusah approach to learning talmud. In a country wth virtually no Yiiddin but where parents spend over a hundred billion dollars a year on private educational coaching for their kids from preschool to the dreaded college entrance exam, there is a fixation on Jewish learnig techniques which Korean newspapers attribute an ethnic group with 0.2% of the world population having been awarded 28 percent of the Nobel prizes. They’ve focused on what they call the “Chavruthah” educational technique where children are paired together to challenge one another on questions related to whatever they are currently studying and both analyze and probe possible explainations. Korean educational and coaching companies have brought in Israelis to provide “instruction” to their coaches on the “Chavrutah” learning technique and some Koreans are actually seeking to enroll in chinuch programs in yeshivos in EY. They have zero interest in yiddeshkeit per se; only in an educational an unfamiliar learning/instructional technique that might provide some advantage in the insanely competitive Korean educational system. Not that we’ve ever doubted the power of a learning chavrusah for limudei kodesh but the sudden craze in Korea and the amount of money being ivested is surprising even to those familiar with the Korean history of educational “fads”.
It all started with a YWN report years ago…
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