What I Learned by Not Passing It On - The Philosophy of a Korean Author Who Reformed His Own Life First

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This is an account of what one person decided, and kept deciding, over about thirty years. His name is Jeong Jin-hwa. He writes in Korean and founded Jeongdaun Publishing in the Republic of Korea.

1. A promise made in high school

Jeong Jin-hwa was a high school student in South Korea when he made a decision that sounds simple and turned out not to be.

He had opinions about what was wrong with the world around him — the things most teenagers see clearly and adults have learned to stop seeing. But instead of turning that into a demand that others change, he turned it into a condition on himself:

Before I say the word “reform,” I will apply it to my own life first.

He has described this not as a moral achievement but as a constraint. It meant that whenever he wanted to criticize something, he had to first check whether he was living the thing he was asking for. This is a slow way to live. It is also very difficult to fake.

2. The night that could have decided everything

During his compulsory military service, he was beaten by a senior soldier until he lost consciousness.

Anyone who has been through something like this knows the two doors that open afterward. One is to become smaller — to accept that this is simply how power works. The other is to wait until you are the senior, and then do it back.

He took neither.

“I will not become someone who is no different from the person who assaulted me.”

He finished his service without striking, humiliating, or coercing a single junior soldier.

He is careful about how this is described. It was not a decision to endure. He puts it this way:

“It was not a vow to put up with it. It was a vow to prove that a person can live through this without using violence. A vow to endure only holds while you are enduring. A vow to prove something accumulates — each day you live it becomes the evidence, and it builds.”

That distinction is the center of everything else he has written. Endurance depletes you. Proof accumulates. What kept him standing in later years, he says, was not an ability to manage his emotions well. It was having something to prove — to himself, not to an audience.

3. Twenty years in the room where no one is watching

A vow made once is not the same as a life.

He knew this. People reveal who they are in their closest relationships, at the moments when no one is present to stop them. So the real test was not the army. It was home.

Over more than twenty years of marriage, he has not used verbal abuse or violence toward his wife or his children. The goal was specific and modest and, if you think about it, enormous: a household where his wife and children never have to read his face to know whether it is safe to speak.

He also stopped smoking and stopped drinking, and he resists the word “discipline” for it. In his account it did not work as self-denial. What happened was the other way around: as he stopped doubting his own dignity and began to witness and recover it, a kind of self-regard filled in — and the things that would cost him that self-regard simply lost their appeal.

4. Raising children without using them as proof

He and his wife raised two children without relying on South Korea’s private tutoring industry — a genuinely unusual choice in a country where that industry is close to compulsory.

He is careful here too. He does not criticize families who use private education, and he does not present his choice as the answer everyone should copy.

What mattered to him was not whether tutoring was used. It was whether a child, drilled in competition and correct answers, would lose the curiosity and the questions that belong to them.

Two things he tried to prevent:

• that a child learns in order to be approved of by a parent
• that a grade becomes the measure of whether a child is worth something

And what he hoped to give instead: the ability to notice what you actually like and wonder about, and the ability to not abandon yourself after failing.

“Becoming a parent is not a process of changing your child into what you intended. It is a process of confronting, through how you treat your child, how you have been treating yourself.”

“If a parent is excessively afraid of a child’s failure, inside that fear there may be an old anxiety that the parent themselves must never fail.”

So the starting point for being a good parent, in his view, is not fixing the child. It is the parent stopping the attempt to prove their own worth through someone else’s achievement.

5. From the home to the classroom

He does not treat school violence as only a matter of separating an offender from a victim and applying a penalty. Those steps are necessary. They are also late.

Before violence there is an accumulation: ridicule and exclusion, misunderstanding and silence, imbalance of power, the slow severing of a relationship. And the position most people occupy during that accumulation is the bystander’s position — usually not out of indifference, but out of fear of being next, or of making things worse, or of simply not knowing what to do.

So his books give people something to do instead of something to feel guilty about: stop participating, add the second voice after someone else speaks first, speak to the person who is alone, connect them to a trusted adult, write down what you saw.

On rights, he refuses the trade-off that dominates this debate:

“Teachers and students are both beings who have the right not to be humiliated or threatened. Protecting one person’s dignity must never be done in a way that lowers another person’s.”

And on reconciliation, he is firm in a way that matters to anyone who has been harmed: restoration is not making the wrong into something that never happened, and it is not demanding unconditional reconciliation. It means not minimizing the harm, keeping responsibility clear, and separating fact from interpretation, feeling from need, responsibility from next action. Restoration moves at the pace of the person who was harmed.

6. Reading an old book against today’s choices

He reads the Dao De Jing — not as an antique, and not as a source of quotations, but against the choices in front of him today. He is not interested in principles that are admired. He is interested in principles that survive contact with a Tuesday.

7. In the age of AI, your own question in your own writing

He now works on what education should mean when a machine can produce a fluent answer to almost anything.

His position is not that the tools are dangerous. It is that a person who has never formed their own question has nothing to check the answer against. So the thing worth protecting is the capacity to ask — and to write the answer in your own words, in your own hand.

Why this is free to read

Jeong Jin-hwa gives lectures at schools, libraries, and public institutions without a speaking fee. One of his ten ebooks is free. This article is free, and so is every page on the publisher’s site.

There is a reason that is consistent with everything above. If a person’s dignity does not have to be earned, then the account of how one person tried to live that way should not be behind a payment either.

If you read this and nothing else, that is a complete outcome.

If you would like to read further

Everything below is optional.

• The author’s life and thought, in full (English): https://www.jeongdaun.com/international/en/
• Available in 30 languages — Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Persian, Filipino, German, Russian and more: https://www.jeongdaun.com/international/
• The free introductory ebook — Time to Meet the Author First (ISBN 9791199904903): https://www.jeongdaun.com/books/9791199904903
• All ten ebooks: https://www.jeongdaun.com/

Jeongdaun Publishing · Jeong Jin-hwa
Republic of Korea
https://www.jeongdaun.com
jeongdaunpub@gmail.com

This article is general reading and educational material. It does not substitute for professional counselling, medical, or legal advice.