From 2026 all universities in South Korea will be obliged to take records of school bullying into account at admission

From 2026 all universities in South Korea will be obliged to take records of school bullying into account at admission. Previously this was voluntary; now it is compulsory: an applicant with a record of violence in his school file has his score reduced or is simply turned away. In 2025 alone, six of the largest state universities, Seoul National University among them, rejected 45 applications from candidates with a history of school violence, two of them with excellent examination results. Of the 397 applicants with such records in 2024, the universities refused 298.

The reform was prompted by the scandal of the prosecutor general's son, who had tormented his classmates yet entered the country's best university with a token penalty of two points. Public opinion was incensed. The Netflix series «The Glory», a tale of a bullying victim's revenge that the whole country watched, did its part too.

Now a record of violence at the first levels of severity stays in the personal file for up to four years after leaving school; expulsion from school stays there for good.

The decision is controversial, and not without reason. To place a lifelong mark on a fourteen-year-old is one thing. But there is another side. Hannah Arendt wrote that violence is committed not by monsters but by ordinary people whom nobody stopped in time and who suffered no consequences. Bullying is no exception in this respect. It reproduces itself precisely because the system spent years pretending it did not exist.

In Golding's «Lord of the Flies» a choir of English schoolboys turns within weeks into a hunting pack that kills one of its own. Golding wrote the book after the Second World War and said outright that he wished to show how brutality is not imported from outside civilisation but lives within it. Any school class is, in a sense, just such an island. The only question is whether there is anyone prepared to intervene.

Sartre, in «Being and Nothingness», described the gaze of the other as that which turns a person into an object. The victim of bullying lives this literally: her existence is reduced to the way others see and name her. She ceases to be a subject. That is why the trauma of bullying lasts so long: it breaks not the body but the sense of one's own reality.

Dostoevsky described this in the chapter «Boys» of «The Brothers Karamazov», a short tale of school cruelty in which Ilyusha dies because he has been hounded, and Alyosha tries to explain to the children that a single good memory may keep a person from falling for the rest of his life.

The South Korean reform, for all its legal awkwardness, says much the same thing: there must be consequences. Not forty years later in a therapist's consulting room, but now.