Abstract
<p>This article examines why an educational success narrative whose practical efficacy has become increasingly unstable continues to organize schools during the college-admissions period, and why the same school structure is experienced by students as different forms of suffering. Narrative is defined here as a form of practical knowledge that links an account of what constitutes a good life, prescriptions for what one must do to attain it, and a causal understanding of why the prescribed path is expected to work. When a narrative organizes repeated practices, it becomes objectified in the allocation of school time, assessment, college counseling, recognition, and resources. Yet the collective practices organized by the narrative, together with broader social change, may erode the very conditions on which the narrative rests. The efficacy of the path may therefore begin to falter while the norms and institutions built around it persist for much longer.Using college-admissions-centered schooling as a heuristic case, the article analyzes this desynchronization and assembles the dimensions differentiated through the argument—temporal lag, internalization, institutional distribution, narrative quality, and the conditions of survival, performance, and exit—into a V-Q-C coordinate framework. It then derives five mechanisms from different configurations of these dimensions: suffering internal to the narrative, the double bind, anomic suffering, structural compulsion, and guilt produced by attacks on legitimacy.Finally, the article redefines the task of schooling not as training students in the resilience to endure every form of friction, but as Bildung: the joint cultivation of the capacities and conditions required to interpret the character of friction and to revise, suspend, or exit a given path. Korean schools may teach diverse forms of knowledge while still reducing legitimate life paths to the college-admissions track. Educational pluralism should therefore be assessed not only by the number of subjects taught, but also by the distribution of time, security, recognition, and reversibility that enables students to genuinely test different forms of life.</p>