Growing Together

Abstract

‘Education’ has a twofold effect on learners, depending on the intention of the teachers. On the one hand, education isolates individual thoughts and limits a person’s process of imagination. Therefore, people who provide education (that is, the dominator) could easily deal with learners as they intend. On the other hand, education can also give liberty to the oppressed. North Korean life is dominated by the Kim family's ideology; people there have a distorted view of art, which makes them praise the North Korean system and intensify the ideology. However, after entering South Korea, defectors experience art differently. Their art education seems like an art therapy, which removes their previous knowledge of art. During the period of art re-education, they could overcome their trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more easily. Due to artistic activity, they could overcome their previous knowledge of art and try to express their freedom. In this study, I explore the positive effects of art education and introduce an example of emancipatory art education through the alternative school of North Korean youth defectors and their theatre group in South Korea.

Notes

1 The Korean word Juche is usually translated as ‘self-reliance’. Juche,a compound of Ju (owner, subject) and Che (body) in hanja (Chinese characters), literally translates as ‘the owner of the body’. Kim Jong-il wrote that ‘the basic advantage of our form of socialism (Juche) is that it is a man-centred society, a society which considers everything with man at the centre and makes everything serve him’ (Kim 1990:6). In 1955

Kim Il-sung ‘stressed the need to domesticate or “Koreanize” communism’, i.e. ‘the foundation of self-determinant action’ (Lee 1981:29). ‘North Korea’s Juche is best understood as the institution that has emerged out of the interactions between Kim Il -sung’s group and its challengers and between the North Koreans and outsiders, particularly the Soviets and Chinese’ (Suh 2013:24).