Misery in dark shadows behind the high achievement scores in South Korean schooling: an ethnographic study

Abstract

This article explores some of the hidden background behind the highly praised school results in South Korea. An ethnographic case study is used to cast light on how schooling is actually experienced by South Korean students. Two main results are reported from these data. First, evidence is presented of damaging cultural elements such as internalised norms of resistance and conformity, symbolised helplessness, studying without any interest in controversial issues, an internalised culture of “dealing” and widespread playing with mobile phones, sleeping and applying make-up in class. Second, evidence is presented of an institutionalised school violence involving mechanisms of control, abusive and violent everyday language, explicit school violence and delinquent/deviant behaviour. The article concludes that there is something unique and deeply disturbing about institutionalised violence in South Korean schools and that the abysmally low subjective wellbeing levels of pupils are no coincidence.

Keywords:

• South Korean education
• school culture
• ethnographic case study
• institutionalised violence
• covert violence

Notes

1. A fourth discursive theme, on the educational implications of South Korea gradually but problematically turning into a multicultural society, is receiving more attention in the literature, but we leave it out of consideration here as tangential to the aim of the present article.

2. Bbang means “bread” in Korean. Bbang Shuttle is a new Korean term used by school teenagers. It refers to an action or a person who commits it: that of buying bread or cigarettes or other things for peers who have power over them and would otherwise punish them.

3. The first author has attempted to do so elsewhere (Kwon 2015).

4. The names of the schools were abbreviated to the initials of their English names.

5. All names of participants are fictitious.

6. Mainstream subjects are Korean, Math and English: in South Korea, students normally see non-mainstream subjects as unimportant because they are not primary subjects in the university entrance examinations.

7. The teaching subjects of interviewees were Korean, English and History. Korean and English are mainstream subjects while History is not. The nature of these particular subjects could have caused biased perceptions. However, subject background did not seem to influence responses much. Rather, differences in age and work experience were more predictive of teachers’ understandings and perceptions of students. These differences for teachers are described fully in the first author’s PhD thesis (Kwon 2015) – for instance, teachers in the older generation are shocked to see students wearing make-up while teachers of a younger generation do not mind. In the present article, however, the focus is on the daily experiences of students rather than teachers.

8. The levels of students’ academic achievement were measured by students’ academic records from their middle school and entrance score provided by form tutors. In S high school, students were allocated to classes from Class 1 to Class 10 based on their entrance score.

9. Critical ethnography has an advocacy perspective on what is observed. Based on this perspective, it examines culture, knowledge and action with a view to changing a society. The critical point here is that it assumes that all research is value-added, challenges the current situation and asks why it is so by linking broader issues to the research context (Carspecken 1996). We plan to make use of the “transformative impulse” of critical ethnography (the aim of changing society), with respect to the data from this study, in a separate article.

10. Each school has its own regulations about: wearing neat uniforms, wearing indoor shoes, no mobiles, wearing name tags, no make-up, not dropping litter and so on. There are two interesting (said Jonghyun and Namsoons) regulations in S high school – getting penalty points if students disrespect teachers and prohibiting “acts of demoralisation” (e.g. holding hands, whispering between boys and girls). However, those regulations are usually not taken very seriously by students.

11. The common use of military language to describe violence in South Korean schools deserves a study of its own. It might be argued that some of the violence found in this study is explicable with reference to facts about the recent militant history of the country and that it is still, officially, in a state of war with its neighbour, North Korea (Kwon 2015). Such conjectures, however, lie outside our present purview.