Higher education in Korea

M Kehoe - The Journal of Asian Studies, 1949 - cambridge.org
The Journal of Asian Studies, 1949cambridge.org
In all honesty it must be admitted that higher education, as we know it in America, does not
exist in Korea. Seoul National University, which claims to be the largest and most"
collegiate" of the universities there, is really no more than an association (on paper) of
institutions, mostly without everything we consider necessary for education. First of all, there
is almost no faculty. If a department has one trained, professional scholar on its staff, it is
distinguished. The majority of teachers, calling themselves professors, would not be …
In all honesty it must be admitted that higher education, as we know it in America, does not exist in Korea. Seoul National University, which claims to be the largest and most" collegiate" of the universities there, is really no more than an association (on paper) of institutions, mostly without everything we consider necessary for education.
First of all, there is almost no faculty. If a department has one trained, professional scholar on its staff, it is distinguished. The majority of teachers, calling themselves professors, would not be considered suitable to teach in our most informal, noncredit, extension courses, where the least requirements are demanded of instructors. There are no laboratories in a modern understanding of that term. 1 There are, instead, usually a few dusty beakers and several gas jets (without gas). There are always an impressive collection of Oriental herbs in glass boxes and several local products of the taxidermist's art. No experiments are carried on, and no materials for experiments are available. American medical advisors, however, have found some modern equipment, left by the Japanese, but they have not found Koreans who could operate the equipment. Seoul University boasts a library of hundreds of thousands of books, but those few books not reserved for teachers are largely unused, with pages often uncut. The most important books in any field (and most books necessarily have a publication date before 1940—those printed in the West generally before 1935) find their way to the teacher's office where they are lost to student use. 2 School buildings are entirely without heat through the long Wisconsin-like winters, and classrooms, with many broken windows, are not inviting to students or staff. In cold weather, instructors appear irregularly, if at all, and students" cut" freely without censure. Since their salaries from the university cover only a fraction of their cost of living, it is imperative that all teachers carry additional jobs of some sort. A normal teaching load averages about ten hours. This division of interest is, of course, detrimental to professional work but is recognized by the university administration as necessary in this time of spiraling inflation. Students, too, are regularly employed, and their education must be secondary to their earning a livelihood. There is no graduate school in Korea, and almost no research is being carried on, so that teacher improvement, at the college level, is at a standstill. Since,
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