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Abstract
The term ‘publicness’ is a keyword to explain the creation of a people in the history of modern education in Korea in which the relationship between the ruled and the ruling power rapidly changed from the perspective of continuity and discontinuity. In Korea, the term has been commonly used in three different contexts, and its meanings have changed since the 1894 Gabo Reform, the first reform for the modernization of Korea. Even when the ruling power changed in 1910 with Japanese colonialism, the ruling class took the meaning of publicness as a governing institution (管制的 公共性), which had a very weak sense of publicness as an ethical principle of fairness (Gong [公]) or as public benefit and opinion (Gong [共]). In contrast, the resisting power, which was fully established throughout the colonial era from 1910 to 1945, lacked the sense of publicness as a ruling institution, but embraced the two other concepts of publicness. This historical experience of the competing concepts of publicness materialized into the creation of a modern people through law and education even in the post-colonial period of modern Korea. Generally speaking though, the creation of a modern people in Korea has been strongly affected by the concept of publicness as a ruling institution through a nationalist education.
Notes
1. The public domain mentioned in this article is more of a technical term to explain specific and experiential social phenomena, rather than a strict concept.
2. While it is common that gonggongseong (公共性) is translated as ‘publicness’, its implication is not necessarily the same in the East as in the West. It is even different among Korea, China, and Japan. Therefore, it is necessary to note that there was a transformation of the meaning of Gong (公) and Gong (共) as the result of the long accumulation of historical experiences related to the idea of the public in each country’s unique historical and cultural context. This is why the meaning of ‘Gong’ in the Korean context is divided into three distinct interpretations.
3. The term ‘Publicness’ from 1910 can be referred to as ‘the colonial public’, combining both the controlling public and the resisting public. The relationship between the two can be called ‘competing publicness’. In this article, the idea of the colonial public until around the 1919 Independence Movement of Korea will be analyzed, since this is the period when the form and contents of the basic orientation and nature of the colonial public was established.
4. The Confucian ethics of five cardinal relationships that people are supposed to abide by.
5. The Confucian ethics of three bonds between lord and vassal, parents and children, and husband and wife.
6. Today, this discipline is referred to as classical Chinese studies (漢文學) in Korea.
7. From the Korean Empire’s perspective, it was the US, not the UK, that could control Qing and Japan for Korea, who were competing for control over Joseon. The government also needed people who could manage and operate the electricity, railroads, trams, and waterworks systems introduced by the US.
8. Only 50 Gap-type of Botonghakgyo had been established by 1910.
9. As of 1910, there were around 2250 private schools, far more than the number of public schools approved by the Residency-General.
10. In the colonial Joseon, the schools attended only by Japanese students were called Sohakgyo and Junghakgyo.
11. Of course, the Japanese Government-General could not unconditionally control and pressure private schools and village schools because of its lack of finances to execute its one-school-per-village policy. Thus, although running against its own assimilation policy, it sometimes had to leave those schools to fulfill the educational needs of the Joseon people as a way of controlling their resistant mentality.