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South Korea EDUCATION
Like other East Asian countries with a Confucian heritage,
South Korea has had a long history of providing formal education.
Although there was no state-supported system of primary
education, the central government established a system of
secondary schools in Seoul and the provinces during the Choson
Dynasty. State schools suffered a decline in quality, however,
and came to be supplanted in importance by the sowon,
private academies that were the centers of a neo-Confucian
revival in the sixteenth century. Students at both private and
state-supported secondary schools were exempt from military
service and had much the same social prestige as university
students enjoy today in South Korea. Like modern students, they
were frequently involved in politics. Higher education was
provided by the Confucian national university in the capital, the
Songgyungwan. Its enrollment was limited to 200 students who had
passed the lower civil service examinations and were preparing
for the higher examinations.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
modern private schools were established both by Koreans and by
foreign Christian missionaries. The latter were particularly
important because they promoted the education of women and the
diffusion of Western social and political ideas. Japanese
educational policy after 1910 was designed to turn Koreans into
obedient colonial subjects and to teach them limited technical
skills. A state university modeled on Tokyo Imperial University
was established in Seoul in 1923, but the number of Koreans
allowed to study there never exceeded 40 percent of its
enrollment; 60 percent of its students were Japanese expatriates.
When United States military forces occupied the southern half
of the Korean Peninsula in 1945, they established a school system
based on the American model: six years of primary school, six
years of secondary school (divided into junior and senior
levels), and four years of higher education. Other occupation
period reforms included coeducation at all levels, popularly
elected school boards in local areas, and compulsory education up
to the ninth grade. The government of Syngman Rhee reversed many
of these reforms after 1948, when only primary schools remained
in most cases coeducational and, because of a lack of resources,
education was compulsory only up to the sixth grade. The school
system in 1990, however, reflects that which was established
under the United States occupation.
During the years when Rhee and Park Chung Hee were in power,
the control of education was gradually taken out of the hands of
local school boards and concentrated in a centralized Ministry of
Education. In the late 1980s, the ministry was responsible for
administration of schools, allocation of resources, setting of
enrollment quotas, certification of schools and teachers,
curriculum development (including the issuance of textbook
guidelines), and other basic policy decisions. Provincial and
special city boards of education still existed. Although each
board was composed of seven members who were supposed to be
selected by popularly elected legislative bodies, this
arrangement ceased to function after 1973. Subsequently, school
board members were approved by the minister of education.
Most observers agree that South Korea's spectacular progress
in modernization and economic growth since the Korean War is
largely attributable to the willingness of individuals to invest
a large amount of resources in education: the improvement of
"human capital." The traditional esteem for the educated man,
originally confined to the Confucian scholar as a cultured
generalists, now extend to scientists, technicians, and others
working with specialized knowledge. Highly educated technocrats
and economic planners could claim much of the credit for their
country's economic successes since the 1960s. Scientific
professions were generally regarded as the most prestigious by
South Koreans in the 1980s.
Statistics demonstrate the success of South Korea's national
education programs. In 1945 the adult literacy rate was estimated
at 22 percent; by 1970 adult literacy was 87.6 percent, and by
the late 1980s various sources estimated it at around 93 percent.
South Korean students have performed exceedingly well in
international competitions in mathematics and science. Although
only primary school (grades one through six) was compulsory,
percentages of age-groups of children and young people enrolled
in primary, secondary, and tertiary level schools were equivalent
to those found in industrialized countries, including Japan.
Approximately 4.8 million students in the eligible age-group were
attending primary school in 1985. The percentage of students
going on to optional middle school the same year was more than 99
percent. Approximately 34 percent, one of the world's highest
rates of secondary-school graduates attended institutions of
higher education in 1987, a rate similar to Japan's (about 30
percent) and exceeding Britain's (20 percent).
Government expenditure on education has been generous. In
1975 it was W220 billion (for value of the
won--see Glossary),
the equivalent of 2.2 percent of the gross national product
(GNP--see Glossary),
or 13.9 percent of total government expenditure.
By 1986 education expenditure had reached won 3.76 trillion, or
4.5 percent of the GNP, and 27.3 percent of government budget
allocations.
Social emphasis on education was not, however, without its
problems, as it tended to accentuate class differences. In the
late 1980s, possession of a college degree was considered
necessary for entering the middle class; there were no
alternative pathways of social advancement, with the possible
exception of a military career, outside higher education. People
without a college education, including skilled workers with
vocational school backgrounds, often were treated as second-class
citizens by their white-collar, college-educated managers,
despite the importance of their skills for economic development.
Intense competition for places at the most prestigious
universities--the sole gateway into elite circles--promoted, like
the old Confucian system, a sterile emphasis on rote memorization
in order to pass secondary school and college entrance
examinations. Particularly after a dramatic expansion of college
enrollments in the early 1980s, South Korea faced the problem of
what to do about a large number of young people kept in school
for a long time, usually at great sacrifice to themselves and
their families, and then faced with limited job opportunities
because their skills were not marketable.
Data as of June 1990
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