Education Fever

3. Expanding the Educational System

74 3 Expanding the Educational System The restructuring of education that took place in the years immediately after the end of colonial rule facilitated and shaped an explosive growth of schooling. No feature of South Korea in the decades after 1945 is more striking than the rapid expansion of education at all levels. Hundreds of elementary and secondary schools and scores of colleges and universities were established within a decade, and schooling continued to grow impressively thereafter. A country in which fewer than one in twenty adults had a secondary education, the majority had no formal schooling at all, and relatively few trained teachers and virtually no research facilities existed, became one of the world’s most literate nations, with universal primary and middle school education , highly trained teachers, and enrollments at the tertiary level approaching most advanced industrial nations. Educational development was interrupted by the Korean War but continued through the corruption and economic stagnation of the Rhee regime, the revolution that overthrew him, and the military regimes that governed the country from 1961 to 1987. The pattern of educational development remained fairly consistent as well, despite the change of governments and external and internal crises. Public policies concentrated on achieving universal and uniform standards ¤rst at the primary and then at the middle school levels before actively promoting the expansion of higher tiers of schooling. Thus, education was developed sequentially . Fairly high standards of professionalism among the teaching corps that had been characteristic during colonial times were maintained and enhanced, even though the demand for teachers strained the capacity of the nation’s peda- expanding the educational system 75 gogical institutions. A rigorous and uniform national curriculum was created in the mid-1950s and adhered to thereafter. South Korean education was also characterized by a high degree of internal ef¤ciency. Once students enrolled in school, they stayed in school, progressed through the grade levels, and graduated on schedule. Constant efforts were made to make access to schooling equally available and the schools themselves equal in standard. emphasis on primary education Among developing nations, few have placed more emphasis on sequential development than South Korea. First devoting its limited resources to the primary level, the state then shifted its focus in the 1960s and 1970s to establishing universal middle schools and then to making high school education available to all. This devotion to sequential development was accompanied by a policy of making schooling at the basic levels not only universal, but also uniform in standard and content. This had important consequences for the national preoccupation with schooling, for it meant that the opportunity for advancement to higher levels of education was fairly open to all children. The policy of sequential development began in 1948. While the U.S. military government promoted education at all levels, the Rhee administration (1948–1960) gave priority to establishing universal primary education. Unlike secondary or higher education, it was to be exclusively public; from 1948 South Korean law prohibited private elementary schools. The state’s commitment to providing basic education began at the inception of the Republic of Korea. Article 16 of the Korean Constitution declared elementary education universal and compulsory, and a few weeks after independence the administration informed the National Assembly that it was devising a program to bring about universal primary education.1 In 1949 the administration announced a six-year plan for universal primary education. Under this plan, the state was to undertake an ambitious program of classroom construction, teacher recruitment and training, and enrollment campaigns that would expand primary school enrollment until it reached around 95 percent of the elementary-school-age population in 1956. The outbreak of the Korean War derailed the plan just as it was getting under way, but the commitment to primary education remained. The number of students entering primary school grew rapidly during the 76 expanding the educational system republic’s ¤rst two years. Parents were eager to send their children to school, but parents and of¤cials confronted a shortage of teachers, facilities, and funds. To alleviate the lack of trained teachers, the MOE conducted massive teachertraining programs, which, along with the work done under the supervision of American advisers at the Seoul National University Teacher Training Center, made some headway toward solving the problem. Meanwhile, the shortage of classrooms and teachers resulted in double and even triple class shifts. As a result , teachers at some schools taught from early...