This study aimed to appraise the ongoing reformative efforts of the Korean school system through examining the official documents that were produced for 8 years(1995-2002).The school system was characterized as a kind of closed system in this study an...
This study aimed to appraise the ongoing reformative efforts of the Korean school system through examining the official documents that were produced for 8 years(1995-2002).The school system was characterized as a kind of closed system in this study and inevitably came into conflict with the 'open' reformative programs.The major reformative plans caused ill effects at school scenes and were distorted or modified consequently.The "top-down" reformative ideas could not overcome the deep-rooted "success" ideology of school members and hardly got the spontaneity of them for acting out the programs in daily school life. While the concepts of "contradiction and irony" and "chaos and catastrophe" represented the overall images of school reformation, the original ideals remained "an unachieved dream."Training reformist teachers through per-service programs at university rather than in-service ones was considered as appropriate to bring up spontaneous reformist teachers.