The Public role of school teachers in Korea: For its conceptual reconstruction through its historical tracing

Abstract

This paper makes a bold attempt to make sense of contemporary Koreans’ common expectation of the educational role of public school teachers by tracing its historical and cultural roots to the neo-Confucian humanistic tradition of the Joseon dynasty in Korea that lasted for about 500 years until Korea began to modernize in the late nineteenth century. In this attempt, the key concepts to be explored as equivalent to the Western idea of ‘liberal learning’ are the Confucian ethics of ‘learning for oneself’ and its relation to schooling and teaching. The discussion focuses on whether and how this ethics of learning can be recovered in such a way as to accommodate the postmodern condition of our society, as the educational legacy of the humanistic tradition of East Asia that can keep the public spirit alive in (post-) modern schooling.

Keywords:

• Public role of school teachers
• neo-Confucian educational tradition
• learning for oneself
• learning for others
• the idea of the public

Notes

1. This is also the thesis held by an American educational psychologist Jin Li through her east-west comparative studies on the idea and practice of learning in her book Cultural Foundation of Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

2. A national civil service examination system had been implemented in China since the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) by the emperors for the reason of employment of the talented for the government. It was a system through which people could move up to the class of literati, which was respected as both a social and intellectual class, regardless of their birth class. The examination-obsessed culture common to contemporary East Asian societies is often explained by many scholars as having to do with this historically deep-rooted origin of the Confucian convention (Duncan, 2002, pp. 65–81; Kwak, 2016, p. 5).

3. The Four books are Chinese Classic texts illustrating the core values and beliefs of neo-Confucianism as the core curriculum of civil service examination both in China since thirteenth century and Joseon since fourteenth century up to the late nineteenth century. They are: the Great Learning(大學), the Analects(論語), the Mencius(孟子), the Doctrine of the Mean(中庸).

4. It may be true, as Duncan says (2007, p. 43), that any uncritical consideration in looking for a possibility of some sort of equivalent to the civil society or a public sphere of the West in Joseon society is problematic. But there will be no identical historical conditions even among the western countries in the development of modernization. We also do not intend here to explain the nature of Seowon as part of a grand narrative of modernization in the history of Korea as attempted by ‘the internal development theory of modernization’ among the recent Korean historians. Our intention is much more modest; we just try to see whether there can be any historical and cultural resources that our modern sense of the public can be historically connected to in reconstructing its concept.

5. Here again I find Haboush’s strategy more productive than Duncan’s caution. While being sensitive to the substantial differences between the European bourgeoisie and the Joseon scholars, Haboush also notes the variances in the ways that civil societies developed in different counties in the West and contends that a flexible use of categories and terminologies from the West may offer a way to conceptualize certain Joseon historical phenomena (2007, p. 44).

6. De Bary also describes Zhu Xi’s academies as a middle institute between the state and the family, which can be described a seed of civil society in the Song China (De Bary & John 1989, p. 11; 2004 De Bary, p. 119).

7. A well-known Kantian thinker Onora O’Neill(1986) holds that the Kant’s notion of a public use of reason can be defined in terms of the audience whom an act of communication may reach. She says: ‘a private use of reason' is “that which a person may make of it in a particular civil post or office”: here, the audience is restricted. Officers, clergy, civil servants, taxpayers must obey and not argue with the orders or doctrine or regulations which govern these roles … By contrast, a public use of reason takes place when the same cleric “as a scholar addressing the real public (i.e. the world at large) … speaks in his own voice …. Communications which presuppose no external authority are, even if they aim at and reach only a small audience, fit to be public uses of reason" (p. 533). Hence we can say that Kant regards communications between ‘men of learning’ who are committed to reasoned inquiry as public, although the circle of communication is very small. This seems to be exactly the way we can describe the committed neo-Confucian literati of Seowon in Joseon.

8. Three Bonds refers to the relations between husband and wife; father and son; and ruler and subject, whereas the five relationships of Confucianism are ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, older sibling and younger sibling, and elder friends and junior friends. Confucianism has strict rules that prescribe those relationships in detail as basic to its morality.