No Alternative? Experiments in South Korean Education ed. by Nancy Abelmann, Jung-Ah Choi, and So Jin Park (review)

This volume is unique among English-language scholarly treatments of South Korean education in that the focus is not mainstream K–16 South Korean educational institutions. Contributors, with the exception of historian Michael Seth, hold terminal degrees in education or anthropology and specialize in fields such as educational policy, teacher education, and multicultural education. The editors identify a major objective for the volume as a primarily ethnographic analysis of the tensions that beset contemporary South Korean education. These tensions are caused by the conflicts between “neoliberal” educational reforms in the Republic of Korea (ROK) characterized by rhetoric and policy that promulgate diversity, choice, and individualism with older South Korean educational ideals and practices. The latter include a commitment to educational egalitarianism and the influential examination system with its attendant powerful forces of credentialism. The editors also hope that their scholarship on the ROK dilemma will serve as a case study for what is described in the introduction as “the global educational predicament that nations inevitably undertake neoliberal reforms while also managing long standing national educational values” (p. 4).

With the exception of Professor Seth’s chapter, which is a succinct summary of his previously published book on postwar ROK elementary, secondary, and higher education, authors of the other chapters in this volume address a range of topics that encompass, in various ways, some of the reform experiments that apparently began in the 1990s. The authors address a variety of topics, including high schools for students rejected by mainstream institutions, home school experiments, the experiences of middle-aged women negotiating Korean National Open University (an institution designed for learners past the conventional college age), and, most interesting for this reviewer, two chapters in which authors focus upon both the strategies of the ROK after-school cram schools and supplementary educational publication firms and consumer—particularly mothers’—opinions on these private educational providers.

There are benefits that anyone interested in South Korean education will derive from reading this volume. Readers who have examined Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports on educational attainment and are impressed by the world-leading South Korean literacy and tertiary education accomplishments accompanied by modest government expenditures, but who do not have time to read Michael Seth’s 2006 Education Fever, get a good overview of the development of contemporary South Korean K–16 education from his chapter. Although I have visited hagwŏn, worked with former cram school teachers, and interviewed Korean university students who attended them, I learned much more about how the strategies of these private institutions, consumer desires and dreams, and the mothers’ grapevine affect the whole dynamic of private educational offerings.

However, I have two criticisms of the book. Usage of the term “neoliberalism” can vary, and the term is inherently ambiguous. What the large majority of education professors who employ it really mean when they use “neoliberalism” is capitalism, which they usually oppose with few or no qualifications or nuances. I could be mistaken, but from reading the book, with the exception of the first chapter, my impression is that every subsequent contributor conceptualizes the growth of private educational entrepreneurs as a bad thing. Are the actual effects of these experiments so unambiguously negative?

Another term that appears frequently throughout this volume is the word “class.” A quick look at the bibliography finds several citations (and favorable references in the narrative) to Marxist-influenced Critical Theory educationists such as Michael Apple, who see educational systems as primarily elite-shaped instruments of oppression of less privileged classes and women. Again, while the book has useful content, more intellectual diversity would have been nice. The tenor of most of the chapters is one of deep pessimism about South Korean education and a reiteration throughout the book of the perceived, almost impossible, obstacles of class and gender that seem to impede ROK educational and individual advancement.

With the...