Teachers empowered by shame: the politics of compressed modernisation and democratisation in South Korean education in the 1980s

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the formation of the teachers’ movement in South Korea, focusing on the publication of the short-lived magazine Minjung Gyoyuk (People’s Education) in 1985. Progressive teachers published this magazine to systematically critique the education practises of the time and seek a new direction for education under repressive conditions, which led to dismissals and arrests of the contributors. This incident became central to the formation of the Korean Teachers’ Union (KTU) in 1989, which emerged in the milieu of compressed growth and the struggle for democratisation. By looking at the cultural notions of shame as a source of struggle, the paper examines the complexity of political and social values inherent in the progressive movement, undergone in the process of compressed modernisation and democratisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Minjung Gyoyuk
• Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU)
• shame
• democratisation
• compressed modernisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All the translations of Korean sources are the author’s. Based on East Asian ordering of names, the Korean individuals are indicated with their surnames first, followed by their given names. The Romanisation for the Korean language follows the ‘Revised Romanisation of Korean’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hongik University Research Grant.

Notes on contributors

Yoonmi Lee

Yoonmi Lee is Professor of Education at Hongik University, Seoul, Korea. She received her PhD at the Department of Educational Policy Studies (majoring in comparative history of education), University of Wisconsin-Madison. She served as President of the Korean Association for History of Education from 2011 to 2012. Her research interests include comparative and transnational history of modern education, education and state formation, cultural politics of education, particularly in the East Asian context. Her publication includes Modern Education, Textbooks, and the Image of the Nation: Politics of Modernization and Nationalism in Korean Education 1880-1910 (New York: Routledge, 2000) and articles published in international journals such as Paedagogica Historica, History of Education, Oxford Education Review, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Curriculum Inquiry.