Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea

I have posted about the educational fever in South Korea. I found an interesting article about the issue.
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Educational expansion in South Korea (hereafter referred to as Korea) has attracted scholars’ attention both inside and outside the country as an exceptional educational and social phenomenon. Foreign scholars who visit Korea for even just a few days would receive a strong impression of Korea’s education fever. In his book Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea, Michael J. Seth (assistant professor of history, James Madison University, Virginia) introduces Korean education fever as follows. “A great air of tension hovered throughout South Korea on 17 November 1999. A special task force had spent months planning for that day. . . . Thousands of special duty police were on alert in many cities. . . . Flights at all the nation’s airports had been restricted, and special efforts had been made to halt construction to avoid creating noise or commotion of any kind” (p. 1). “It was the day of the national university entrance examinations,” (p. 1) not the day of a coup d’état or demonstration. I think this sort of mysterious happening may have led him to write this book.

This book provides useful information concerning an exceptionally successful education transformation in Korea. Korea has changed from “a nation where a majority of the population had no formal education” to “one with some of the world’s highest rates of literacy, high school graduates, and university students” (Book Description). Although many foreign scholars evaluate Korean education fever positively, Korean scholars have worried about it because it has caused so many educational difficulties as well as social problems. Therefore, Korean scholars have recently tried to explain the causes of this education fever and suggested various solutions. Scholars’ work on education fever and expansion can be categorized into two approaches—descriptive and explanatory. Foreign scholars have usually attempted to describe the revolutionary educational expansion in Korea but with a feeling of uncertainty.

This review is a Korean educational sociologist’s comment on Korea’s Education Fever written by an American professor of history who has taught English at a Korean university and participated as an English instructor in a number of in-service training programs for middle and high school teachers for several years in Korea. First of all, I would like to say that I find his work interesting, thoughtful, and significant. In particular, I was very impressed by his careful and extensive data collection. His work is certainly useful not only to foreign scholars but also to Korean scholars, who do not have such a well-organized book covering the contemporary history of Korean education.

I have no doubt that readers will come to know what so-called “education fever” in Korea is through his work. However, readers may have difficulty in understanding why such a phenomenon has happened in this country, which was until relatively recently “an impoverished, largely rural nation ruled by a succession of authoritarian regimes and is now a prosperous, democratic industrial society” (Book Description). In other words, Seth’s work is descriptive rather than explanatory. He has carefully and successfully illustrated society, politics, and the pursuit of schooling in South Korea, but has failed to provide in-depth explanations of why “education fever” happened. I think that this was because he took “a historical approach to measure and probe the causes of Korea’s education fever” (p. 7). He could have taken an explanatory approach by taking on the role of a detective (Winks, 1969). This is not impossible because his study was based on contemporary history, and the data were collected through interviews with teachers, officials, parents, and students and an examination of a wide range of written materials in both Korean and English.

It seems to me that Seth wanted to argue through this book that “South Korea’s education fever was the principal force that drove the country’s extraordinary educational development” (p. 6). He accomplished this purpose by providing sufficient data to prove this argument. I think he also wanted to argue that “this preoccupation with the pursuit of formal schooling was the product of the diffusion of traditional Confucian attitudes toward learning and status, new egalitarian ideas introduced from the West, and the complex, often contradictory ways in which new and old ideals and formulations interacted” (p. 6). This argument, however, remained as a working hypothesis or a proposition to be verified because he was not able to provide sufficient evidence.

If he had reviewed the current literature published after 1999 in Korea, he could have explained why Korea is a society which sets excessive value on a person’s academic background. Korean scholars have tried to explain the rapid educational expansion in Korea with various theories that have originated in Western society. They include human capital theory, status attainment theory, screening theory, status competition theory, class control theory, world system theory, and information theory, and so on. These theories are partially useful for explaining the educational expansion that has taken place in Korean society. But they fail to fully capture the peculiarity of Korean educational expansion. We certainly need an alternative theory to explain the Korean case.

I think that a more suitable term to express the explosive educational expansion in Korean society is ‘zeal,’ which means great interest in something and eagerness to be involved in it. Korean educational expansion is the outcome of Koreans’ educational zeal for getting ahead economically, socio-culturally, and/or politically. The expansion is not individual fever but social zeal. Koreans have competed with others for getting longer years of schooling and belonging to a better academic clique. Longer schooling and belonging to a well-named clique have been powerful instruments for getting ahead in this society.

I have used a term, ‘educational zeal’ to describe the cause of rapid educational expansion and many other educational problems in Korea (Oh, 2000). In order to take the educational zeal of Korean people as the main factor of rapid educational expansion, I think, it is necessary to understand the origin and development of educational zeal itself as a unique phenomenon in Korean society. In this context, I intend to build a relevant theoretical model for Korean educational expansion which places the concept of educational zeal at the center of the theory. The terminologies I coined for my theoretical models are ‘education-success correspondence theory,’ ‘group as competition unit theory,’ ‘expanded sharing of experience theory,’ and ‘foreign language as capital theory’.

Through the history of the Chosŏn dynasty, Japanese imperialism, American military occupation, new independent Korean governance, and the rapid economic growth of the last three decades, Korean people have witnessed that the educated have got ahead in society. In the midst of the incessant structural change of the society, many people have made their way by means of their educational achievements, which have been regarded as providing an objective and legitimate frame of reference to select and screen people. Therefore, Korean people have come to take education, especially higher education, seriously as a means to success.

In addition, within the intimate kinship system of Korean society, family and relatives usually function as a primary unit of social competition and support the education of their prospective offspring to obtain better positions in social competition. In fact, the social success of any member of the family through educational achievement strengthens the competitiveness of the whole family. Therefore, every member of Korean society is convinced that schooling is a trustworthy way to success, values education more than anything else, and invests in education at any cost.

Another important factor is that Korea has been historically under the influence of superpowers, such as China, Japan, and the United States of America. As a result, the ability to command foreign languages has been the key to achieving upward social mobility in Korea. Chinese, Japanese, and English have functioned as decisive cultural capital for getting ahead in the Chosŏn dynasty, during the Japanese colonial period, and after independence respectively. Nowadays, English is the most important linguistic capital for getting life chances. Under this circumstance, Korean people demand more and more education to learn foreign languages.

This noteworthy educational expansion led by the enthusiastic educational demand coming from the Korean people has resulted from the situations mentioned above. In sum, educational success is directly connected to the social success of the individual and the family as a whole in Korean society, and educational zeal has originated in people’s recognition of this reality and their experience of the educational effect on social success.

We, Korean scholars want to listen to foreign scholars’ insightful explanations about our country’s educational zeal rather than to hear visitors’ impressions about us. We hope that foreign scholars are able to ascertain the causes of problems which insiders cannot perceive, explain the phenomena more objectively than we do, and offer insightful suggestions for solving the problems. I am in great hopes that Seth will continue his research on Korean history and education. I also hope that he will receive Korean scholars’ assistance when writing subsequent books so that he will have little difficulty in using terms, concepts, and Korean names appropriately. I will honestly welcome him if he joins us, the Korean Society for the Study of Education and the Korean Society for the Study of the Sociology of Education.

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By Oh, Ookwhan 2006
Review of Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea, by Michael J. Seth (2002)
Korean Studies Review 2006, no. 08
Electronic file: http://koreaweb.ws/ks/ksr/ksr06-08.htm

The Crisis of the Korean Public Education

Korean has higher education fever than any other nations. It is a social atmosphere and gradually increasing. About 90% of secondary school students take out-of-school lessons such as English, math, science, and other subjects for preparations of school classes. Young elementary school students are also in the same situation. After school they study in each institute or with tutors to get good GPA. The tuition is not cheap. Therefore, much of a family income is spent in private education for their children. (In Korea, the regular school education including public and private schools is called the public education, and individual out-of-school lessons such as tutoring or private institutes are called the private education.)

However, the private education fever has caused the collapse of public education. Students who already studied the curricula feel bored by the school classes. Some of them stealthily study other materials in the classroom. Several students even sleep or doze in class because they take out-of-school lessons until late night so are tired. Many students think that they don’t need to concentrate in class because they already know the classwork. As a result, teachers’ job satisfaction is decreasing, and the will to teach is also weakening. Most teachers feel that their professional teaching ability is not respected by their students. The most serious problem is that these students cannot study by themselves. They tend to depend on lectures of instructors out of school, so that young students cannot make their own study plan and do not even know how to study by themselves.

How about your country's public schools? Do you have any problems similar to South Korean schools?

Korean school system and curriculum

The Korean public education structure is divided into three parts: six years of primary school, followed by three years of middle school and then three years of high school.

The primary curriculum consists of nine principal subjects: moral education, Korean language, social studies, mathematics, science, physical education, music, fine arts, and practical arts. English-language instruction now begins in the third grade, so that children can start learning English in a relaxed atmosphere through conversational exchange, rather than through rote learning of grammatical rules as is still the practice in many middle and high schools.

Upon completion of primary school, students advance to middle school, which comprises grades seven through nine. The curriculum consists of 12 basic or required subjects, electives, and extracurricular activities. While elementary school instructors teach all subjects, middle school teachers, like their colleagues in the United States, are content specialists. High schools are divided into academic and vocational schools. A small number attended specialized high schools concentrating in science, the arts, foreign languages, and other specialized fields. Most of these specialized schools are so-called elite schools. Only top students in middle schools can enter into these schools.

I'm an art teacher from South Korea

Hi, All!

I am Seri Son. I am an art teacher in a middle school in South Korea. I am temporally retiring for several years from 2007. I have taught just for a year as an art teacher. But, I love teaching and my students!
In the fall of 2008, I entered the University of Tennessee and am pursuing an M.S. degree in Instructional Technology. This is my second semester and I think this field of study is very interesting.
After starting this study in the U.S., I have been concerned with diverse cultures, and education in various countries. Because, I have met many people who have a various skin color, different cultures, and values, so that I realized that a much bigger world than my thought before exists.

I hope we meet many people in different countries and share various opinion and information about our education.

Art Class in Teahwa Middle School, South Korea