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KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea , by Michael J. Seth. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 2002, v + 305 pages. (ISBN 0824825349, cloth)
reviewed by Ookwhan Oh
Ewha Women’s University, Seoul[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 6.2 (July 2003): 176-180. Acta Koreana is published by Academia Koreana of Keimyung University.]
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.
References
Oh, Ookwhan (2000). Han’guk sahoeŭi kyoyug’yŏl: Kiwŏn’gwa simhwa [Educational zeal in Korean society: origin and deepening]. Seoul: Kyoyukwahaksa.
Winks, Robin W. (ed.) (1969). The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence. New York: Harper and Row.
Citation:
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