Background & Origins
Two Korean-American educators with graduate degrees earned during the Great Depression. One a frontier chemist and the other a semantics scholar. The upbringing that produced a framework thirty years in the making.
A renowned organofluorine chemist and professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder (1947-1972). He earned his Ph.D. from The Ohio State in 1937, and became an apprentice engineer under Thomas Midgley Jr., who was an American mechanical and chemical engineer, who played a central role in developing leaded gasoline and Freon refrigerants, which later had significant environmental consequences. Dr. Park's work on organofluorine compounds placed him in the lineage of CFC chemistry and its effects on the earth's ozone layer. He was also a pivotal architect of modern Korea's educational and industrial partnership. He was the 2nd President of KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) from 1972–1974.
English and semantics teacher. Earned her Master's degree from the University of Hawaii in 1937, when there were few people, much less Korean women, pursuing graduate degrees. Her 1937 Master's thesis, The Koreans in Hawaii, is one of the earliest academic sources tracing how Koreans first emigrated to Hawaii in 1903–1905, and on to the rest of the United States. (ref 1, ref 2)
EJ Park's childhood memories include a massive dictionary sitting atop its own wheeled stand, a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, (impossible to read without the aforementioned dictionary), and his own lab bench in his father's chemistry laboratory at the University of Colorado. With two professors as parents, his education was continuous, literally 24/7 scientific methodology from one side, and semantics from the other.
Although Dr. Park rarely taught undergraduates, occasionally he would teach a Chem 101 introductory class, which would be instantly filled with a long waiting list because of student word-of-mouth. In the class, Dr. Park would ask students to bring in various household items and he would explain the role of chemistry in everything from drain cleaner to baking soda to plastic wrap to aerosol sprays and Scotch tape.
EJ Park's father was recruited by the US Johnson Administration and Korean governments to build a post-Korean War partnership between Korea's educational system and its emerging industry. The model was Dr. Park's own career: perpetual movement between academia and the private sector, never losing sight of his conviction that education exists to make a difference in the real world.
Dr. Park would delay final oral exams until each student had a firm offer of employment. All graduate research projects were sourced from his industry contacts. (See page 389 of Origins of Korean State Science, by John Paul DiMoia.)
EJ Park was never able to sit in on one of his mother's classes, as she retired from teaching to start the family. From his experiences at home and meeting some of her former students, he knew she was a terrific teacher — stricter and more authoritarian in method than his father.
As a young, female Korean teacher in the Honolulu public school system in the 1940s, Eric's mother was given the not-so-great assignments — with mostly what you would today call "problem students." Picture a five foot two, 98-pound woman collecting switchblades and other non-education related paraphernalia every day before class.
It seemed impossible that students who carried these weapons to school could amount to anything, until Park met the judges, lawyers, and teachers who had once been his mother's students.
"I was raised in an ether of scientific method and semantics. To question everything, apply logic and imagination to determine hypotheses, then rigorously test those hypotheses and follow the results to their logical solution."
While not explicitly demanded of him, it certainly seemed expected, although his parents were genuinely concerned when so much of their son's thinking was "outside the box," and often caused, "challenges."
Three decades of development, documented from the first online encyclopedia to a mathematically certain law of marketing.