Escaping obsolescence? The shift from subject to skill based education in a South Korean international school

ABSTRACT

This paper interrogates how upper-class South Korean locals attending a newly established international school in the Songdo International Business District in South Korea, are socialized to both envisage and escape obsolescence. The stagnation of Songdo’s population growth in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, which altered many corporations’ plans to relocate to this ‘aerotropolis’ remains key in subjects’ theorizations of capitalism’s failures. Acknowledging that we live under conditions of market volatility, administrators and faculty shift their pedagogical goals from subject to skill-based education. ‘Resilience’ is highly valued as a character trait drawing from emotional resources to operate in futures that cannot yet be imagined. Attempts to create desirable forms of human capital undergird the formation of educational experiences, conducive to producing twenty-first century global leaders, but they also generate uncertainty and reveal the complexity of maintaining privilege in competitive environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Global education
• adolescence
• market volatility
• human capital
• South Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In December 2015, this translates to approximately US $32,500.

2 Drawing from Foucault’s work, Feher (2009) argues that the paradigmatic shift between liberalism and neoliberalism lies in the erosion of the separation of ‘intimate man’ whose potential cannot be fulfilled by solely operating as a laborer in a distinctly identifiable market and ‘the entrepreneur’. In turn, self-improvement through achievements in education and attainments in vital health are central to augmenting one’s value as capital (p. 33).

3 Colloquially, South Koreans refer to this as ‘the International Monetary Fund Crisis’.

4 This is not to suggest that study abroad is quickly disappearing. A 2014 Brookings Institute study shows that South Koreans continue to make up the largest percentage of foreign visa holders on US college campuses.

5 Feher (2009) also asserts that the formation of human capital is ‘less a symptom of the gradual “commodification” of the liberal subject than it is the expression of an emergency neoliberal condition, the novelty of which has been so far underestimated’ (p. 25).

6 In 2016, the first class graduated from Williams International.

7 The numbers collected during the second semester of 2016 show that enrolment increased to 1137 of which 525 students were domestic.

8 Ornithologists now document the near extinction of the Black-faced Spoonbill, Chinese Egret, Great Knot, Relict Gull, and Saunder’s Gull (Birds Korea) and question to what extent Songdo is in fact a ‘sustainable’ city.