Shining light into dark shadows of violence and learned helplessness: peace education in South Korean schools

Abstract

The paper illustrates how a culture of violence is perpetuated and reproduced in South Korea through schooling and argues that peace education could help transform a culture of violence to a culture of peace. Critical ethnographic methods and a framework of peace education were applied to a sample of secondary schools in South Korea to argue that a disturbing culture of violence and learned helplessness were present; this comprises themes of direct and indirect violence through iljin (a group of students who are considered key perpetrators of school violence); a colonized false ideology and resistance to social justice. More positively, findings are also used to generate possibilities for pedagogical change based on peace education – an approach that proves useful both as an analytical frame for examining peace-violence relations in education and society and as an essential pedagogy for progressing towards peace in South Korean schools.

Keywords:

• South Korean schools
• peace education
• pedagogical change
• critical ethnography

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editor and 2 blind reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Critical pedagogy engages educators in a critical, dialectical examination of how power relations (particularly those connected to the construction of knowledge) operate in schools and society, and then equips teachers and students to become transformative democratic agents who recognize, challenge, and transform injustice and inequitable social structure. (Chubbuck and Zembylas 2011).

2. The names of the schools are pseudonyms.

3. This organization was considered illegal until ex-president Kim Daejung legalized it in 1999. In the intervening years, many teachers were dismissed. Bongsu has also been dismissed for being a member of the KTU.

5. The student’s Human Rights Ordinance was issued in 2010 in Gyunggi province and was extended to other provinces and major cities in South Korea. For instance, Seoul announced the Ordinance in 2012. Among other issues, the Students’ Ordinance for Human Rights has prohibited corporal punishment.

6. A messenger application in smart phones, free for those who can access the internet. People can send messages like text messages and can also chat with it. South Koreans call it ‘katalk’.

7. This is not intended here as a criticism of what is typically known as ‘character education’ as distinct from citizenship education or peace education, but is simply meant as a reminder that character education needs to be geared towards the character/ethos of the school as well as that of individual students.