After liberation, Korean education has developed without much change in effort to put the vestige of education from Japanese colonial era and anticommunist basis. Therefore, in order to examine the meaning and limit of current Korean education, it is ...
After liberation, Korean education has developed without much change in effort to put the vestige of education from Japanese colonial era and anticommunist basis. Therefore, in order to examine the meaning and limit of current Korean education, it is necessary to take a look at the activities of educational world right after liberation. In order to do so, the article examines the characteristics of ideals and theories of education established during early Korean government focusing on ‘democratic national education theory’ by Ho-Sang Ahn, who served as the first minister of education of Korea.
After liberation, Ho-Sang Ahn continued educational activities and served as minister of education at the Seung-Man Lee’s government, taking the role of ideologue of one nation principle. As intellectual of Japanese colonial era, Ho-Sang Ahn entered religion called Daejonggyo, establishing the concept of ethnic nationalism based on blood. Also, in association with many Daejonggyo figures and experience from the council of the representatives got the idea of thoroughly opposing communism and thus attempted nation’s unity of idea.
From studying in Germany and Japan, Ho-Sang Ahn met with extreme nationalists and supremacists and adding this to his existing blood-tied nationalism became national supremacist. The nationalism Ho-Sang Ahn learned at this time put the country as the absolute high value, putting individual people below the country and furthermore justifies the logic of war.
Under such experience of Japanese colonial era, Ho-Sang Ahn established national view and country view and such tendency is also visible in his education theory. Ho-Sang Ahn tried unite the ideas of students through education, especially emphasizing ‘man of loyalty’ trying to make people like ‘hwarang’ who can sacrifice for the country. After Yeosu-Suncheon incident, became even more anticommunist and made the Student National Defense Corps. Not only that, he purged the left affiliated teachers, dispersed all organizations in the school to achieve unity of idea and tried to control all students’ behavior and thoughts under the command of government as superior authority.
Not only students and teachers, Ho-Sang Ahn tried to achieve this unity of idea among general public, opening ‘one nation principle’ propagation through lectures all around the country and re-education of adults to lead them to the ideology.
Such activities are to be examined with the Seung-Man Lee government’s early national unity. The national unity through unity of idea at this time was achieved through his ‘democratic national education theory’ and ‘Ilminism education theory.’ However, Ho-Sang Ahn’s ‘democratic national education theory’ absolutized the leader’s idea and the leader of this time was Seung-Man Lee. In such circumstances under Ho-Sang Ahn’s education theory of strong anticommunism, individual characteristics and freedom of idea was worthless before country and nation.
This argument goes further into recreating self-annihilation for the sake of one´s country, which directly shows Japan’s logic for war under Japanese colonization, and showed in very violent forms such as regulation and purge. Such authoritarian educational policy was, as already pointed out several times, not so different from the one of Japanese colonial era.
Meanwhile, Ho-Sang Ahn continuously used the expression ‘democratic’ referring to his educational theory ‘democratic national education.’ However, this was far from the fundamental meaning of democracy and was only figure of speech based on atmosphere of the time. Ho-Sang Ahn tried to find the original form of democracy from ‘Korean tradition,’ and his ‘view of democracy’ defined on such bases had similar logical structure of Jung-Hee Park government’s ‘Korean democracy.’
Like this, Ho-Sang Ahn continued educational policy as extreme nationalist and national supremacist. On one hand, he is an example how an intellectual’s life and experience shows in Korean society after liberation. His direction of educational policy interlocks with the henceforth-established governments, continuing into Korea’s educational flow without much change.