Funny this popped up in my feed again just now, just as Im dealing with my Kim SHinil article again (Kim, S. (1987). Korean Education: Past and Present. Korea Journal, 1987(April), 5-21.): Th school as Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus The prioritizing of state interests in relation to educational curriculum was the defining aspect of education under the Japanese. As part of the ongoing efforts to Japanize the Korean people, the Ministry of Education was made to set up a censoring system for textbooks used in Korean schools. The conventional wisdom was that “Acquisition of learning for which there is no use is a sure way to make a person rebellious.” The not-so-subtle subtext here is the meaning attached to “...learning for which there is no use,” as each of the nine “deploring deviant” elements to be eliminated from the curriculum were critical, political attitudes that questioned the Japanese legitimacy to occupy Korea. Here was the exemplification of the state’s efforts to “manufacture consent”. However, in South Korea after World War II, this prioritizing of state interests in relation to education was an inevitable result of the dire conditions in which the newly-divided Koreas found themselves. Under Syngman Rhee, the government followed a very pragmatic ideology. “One skill for one man” was the spirit of the day, and made sense, given the need to reconstruct the economy and rebuild a country ravaged by war. After 1960, this pragmatic tendency became even more focused, as education became a tool for modernization and development. The Ministry of Education, in an effort to “modernize the fatherland”, reformed the curriculum via educational policies embodied in slogans like “education for economic development” and “education that contributes to modernization.” It was in this way that Pak Chung Hee recognized the utility of developmental education in cultivating “the second economy” that would be necessary to support the “first economy.” This “second economy” was the one of belief, value systems, and attitudes, the first being the fiscal economy. In Pak’s view, the first could not exist without the second, and if the second economy did not develop commensurate with the first, the success of the first economy would be in jeopardy. To this end, the New Village Movement, the saemaul undong, was launched, as part of the economic program. The 1970s saw the complete fusion of doctrines of development and the education system. According to Kim, “Education that produces” was a slogan to be found in any public school at the time. After the Yushin Declaration in 1972, totalitarian ideology dominated the curriculum, and it was during this time that many books were rewritten, and the specific goals of the developmental agenda were able to be put into action. Also, Pak must have known that to undertake developmental education in the fullest sense, the state must have a great deal of power. Education was not valued for education’s sake, but rather for its ability to construct compliant citizens for the economic and developmental interests of the state. In both cases, these were situations when the state had free reign over the development of power over its own citizenry, but chose a form of education that was nothing more than ideological indoctrination coupled with the necessary knowledge demanded for developing a “useful” unit of production. The true tragedy is the fact that the education students received was lacking: After Liberation, we ought to have had the self-reflective and self-analytical power to throw away the instrumentalist educational philosophy. We ought to have endeavored to find out what the real, intrinsic value of education would be when education stopped being a mere instrument. The value of education lies in its ability to raise the intellectual and moral maturity of and the act of education promotes this intellectual and moral maturation discarding the elements the elements that hinder this process. The value of education, therefore, stands, of necessity, in opposition with the economic value sought after by the educational theory that trains man as a faithful productive machine... This is why reforms and half-measures to change Korean education system dont work. The state has relied on and “instrumentalists education system” since the beginning of the South Korean state to bolster economic development and maintain social control. As long as the structure utilizes education this way, real efforts to instill so-called “critical thinking” skills into the classroom will inevitably fail, because they actually have no place and are ideologically problematic. Theres a reason that South Korean schools seem like jail to its students. Thats because that is exactly what the South Korean school is. And this thing working very well that way for decades and wont change anytime soon.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 09:20:26 +0000
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