No Alternative? The Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies editors: Noh Tae-Don, Seoul National University; John Lie, University of California, Berkeley advisory board: John Duncan, UCLA; Henry Em, New York University; Roger Janelli, Indiana University; Michael Shin, University of Cambridge; Sem Vermeersch, Seoul National University; Chang Dukjin, Seoul National University The Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies is a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, Seoul National University. The series promotes the global dissemination of scholarship on Korea by publishing distinguished research on Korean history, society, art, and culture by scholars from across the world. No Alternative? Experiments in South Korean Education Edited by Nancy Abelmann Jung-ah Choi So Jin Park Global, Area, and International Archive University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London The Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is an initiative ofthe Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the University of California Press, the California Digital Library, and international research programs across the University of California system. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48 – 1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Nancy Abelmann, Jung-ah Choi, and So Jin Park part I. Educational Transformation 1. South Korea’s Educational Exceptionalism 17 Michael Seth 2. South Korea’s “School Collapse” Debates 28 Jae Hoon Lim part II. Alternative Education 3. A Second-Chance High School: Students’ Second-Class Internalization and Stratification 47 Jung-ah Choi 4. Homeschooling Adventures of the Middle Class 63 Deok-Hee Seo 5. Overcoming the “Pseudo-University”: The Transformative Learning of Adult Women 81 Kiyeon Yi part III. Supplementary Education 6. Private Institutes as Educational Sedatives 97 Misook Kim 7. Mothers’ Anxious Management of the Private After-School Education Market 115 So Jin Park Notes 133 Bibliography 141 Contributors 157 Index 159 Acknowledgments This book emerged from a workshop held at the University of Illinois in 2003 entitled “South Korea’s Neoliberal Educational Transformation: The Ethnography of Classed Experience.” It was generously supported by many campus units, including the College of Education and the Departments of Anthropology and East Asian Languages and Cultures. We are grate- ful to those presenters whose insights informed this volume but whose work is not featured here: Michael Hurt, Jin-heon Jung, and Jesook Song. It is thanks to the excellent research assistance of Yoonjung Kang that the manuscript was able to take final shape. We are also indebted to John Cho for his editorial assistance in the final phase of the manuscript preparation; and to Dohye Kim for her tireless and nearly endless help with the copy- edited manuscript. And we extend our sincere thanks to Nathan MacBrien, the publication director at UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, for shepherding this manuscript throughout and for his editorial hand. The book also has been greatly strengthened thanks to the careful reading of two anonymous reviewers. Finally, we are grateful for the patience and goodwill of all of the contributors, who have had to wait some years for this book to appear. Nancy Abelmann is indebted to Jung-ah for her enthu- siastic role as co-organizer of the workshop and for her unflagging com- mitment to seeing this work published. She also thanks So Jin for agreeing to join as a co-editor and lending her expertise and vision. Jung-ah wants to thank Nancy for her initiative, leadership, and friendship. And So Jin extends her gratitude to Nancy and Jung-ah for organizing the original conference and for inviting her to join as a co-editor. vii Introduction Nancy Abelmann, Jung-ah Choi, So Jin Park This volume takes up burgeoning education venues in South Korea — what we call here “nonmainstream” or “other” education — namely, education beyond daytime K-16 schooling (both public and private, a distinction in South Korea that until recently has not been so significant). These include alternative or second-chance schooling, homeschooling, private after- schooling, and adult distance education. These “other” venues have gar- nered increasing social significance in large part precisely because main- stream schooling has widely been perceived as a problem. These “other” venues then are championed either as correctives to the problems of main- stream schooling or dismissed as nothing other than functional extensions of mainstream schooling, motivated by the same aims and values. The chapters in this volume engage this debate and demonstrate that in fact individuals often simultaneously reject or exit mainstream schooling and embrace or seek to attain the symbolic value of mainstream education. In long proclaiming a “crisis” in education, South Korea joins many other advanced industrial nations, including the United States, Japan, and Great Britain. Although these education crises echo one another, includ- ing, for example, anxiety over the behavior of “youth today,” the quality of teachers, and the ability of schools to prepare the next generation for a changing world, not surprisingly their character and idioms are country- specific. As a country that has experienced both rapid democratization and dramatic increases in standards of living in recent decades, South Koreans have felt that mainstream education has not kept pace with the times. For example, while social life is characterized by ever greater freedoms — of mobility, consumption, speech, and so on — schools, much of the citizenry bemoans, have remained conservative bastions of centralization, hierarchy, and control. Or again, while young South Koreans have arguably emerged 1 2 / Nancy Abelmann, Jung-ah Choi, So Jin Park as global trend-setters in technology, media, and consumption (from music to fashion to online gaming), mainstream schooling has been burdened by its fixed and homogeneous curriculum, allowing for only limited creative expression. Similarly, while South Korea’s economy and rhetoric of glo- balization demand an ever-more creative elite class, its schooling is decried for producing narrow achievers well suited to older economies based on staid, hierarchical conglomerates rather than creative start-up companies and cutting-edge ventures. The alternative education venues introduced in this volume must all be appreciated in this context. Although not the focus of this volume, we can also point to the large number of K-16 students who exit mainstream schooling for so-called early study abroad (chogi yuhak) (i.e., pre-college) as comprising yet another South Korean educa- tion experiment.1 Jiyeon Kang and Nancy Abelmann argue that while in the past chogi yuhak was celebrated as a real alternative, over time the discourse on chogi yuhak reveals that many South Koreans have come to see the phenomenon as merely an extension of, rather than any real chal- lenge to, the South Korean educational market.2 While recognizing the broad-based charge that South Korean main- stream schooling has not changed, we note that in fact all of South Korea’s democratic presidencies have instituted considerable education reforms. Indeed, integral to South Korea’s burgeoning nonmainstream education sector have been education reforms beginning in the mid-1990s, in ac- cordance with democratization, escalating consumerism, and economic restructuring after the so-called IMF crisis, and globalization. The Kim Young Sam government (1993 – 97) planned and initiated a series of educa- tion reforms to build a new education system, while the Kim Dae Jung government (1998 – 2003) accelerated these reforms in the aftermath of the IMF crisis. In order to cope with the crisis, education reforms were de- signed to transform the citizenry to become “creative citizens” who could compete in the twenty-first-century global economy as self- sufficient and independent actors (Mok, Yoon, and Welch 2003; J. Song 2003). These re- cent neoliberal education reforms are perhaps the most radical and compre- hensive in the history of South Korean education (Mok, Yoon, and Welch 2003, 58; Seth 2002, 169). They initiated dramatic changes in education rhetoric from “uniformity and equality” to “creativity, excellence, and diversification.” In contrast to the emphasis on “uniformity,” “standard- ization,” and “equality” of education during South Korea’s successive au- thoritarian regimes (1961 – 92), neoliberal educational reforms pursued a “decentralized and diversified” curriculum designed to promote students’ “excellence”