Abstract
Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895, and Korea in 1905. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan had already provided compulsory elementary education following the American model of common schools. The colonial rulers also planted a similar system in Taiwan and Korea, but the universal spread of public schooling was retarded and sluggish in the colonies. The colonial public schools were mostly restricted to the elementary level, biased toward males, segregated by ethnicity and charged tuition fees. The development of universal public schooling was not identical in the two colonies. The growth and spread of public elementary schools happened earlier and faster in colonial Taiwan than in colonial Korea. The institutional difference in school finance was key to the differential development of mass schooling in the colonies.
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Notes
- 1.
Korea became a protectorate of Japan in 1905 and was officially annexed into Japan in 1910.
- 2.
Modern schools established by missionaries and indigenous elites continued through the colonial period, and many of them are still in operation today. During the colonial period, these independent private schools played a significant role in educating Korean and Taiwanese people in the secondary and tertiary levels, where the provision of colonial public education was extremely limited. However, elementary education was overwhelmed by mass public schooling later in the colonial period.
- 3.
For convenience, we call the elementary schools for the Japanese children “primary schools,” and schools for Korean and Taiwanese children “common schools.”
- 4.
The annexation of Korea into Japan was in 1910, but here, we count the years since colonization in Korea from 1905, when Korea became Japan’s protectorate. Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895.
- 5.
Hence, the aggregation of the private school and public school enrollment rates does not show a correct nationwide enrollment rate, as it double-counts pupils who attended both. Furthermore, the private school enrollment rate of colonial Korea was at most 9% at its peak. Before 1920, when traditional school might have been a substitute for public elementary education, the sum of private school and public school enrollment rates was around 10%, which was still lower than the common school enrollment rate of Taiwan in the late 1910s. The private school enrollment rate in Korea precipitated in the 1920s, but the rise of the common school enrollment rate stagnated after 1925. Sŏdang in Korea, and also Shobō in Taiwan, was an elite institution in nature. Thus, their role in explaining the universal spread of public education is limited.
- 6.
The county school expense account was only for the finance of common schools in the county. Primary schools for Japanese children in Korea were financed by the association of primary schools, which was subsidized by the government.
- 7.
The school age in each colony was assumed to be 5–14.
- 8.
In the mid-1980s, the support ratio was 0.034 in Bangladesh, 0.04 in Pakistan and 0.054 in India. In the same period, the Korean support ratio was 12.7, and the OECD average of 1988 was 17.3 (Lindert 2003, 335).
- 9.
Taiwan was slightly more urbanized in the early colonial period, probably due to the smaller size. However, the overall progress of urbanization was moderate, and the urbanization rates were similar to each other in the late colonial period. In 1940, the share of population in cities was mere 10.8% in colonial Korea (Chōsen Sōtokufu Tōkei Nenpō) and 12.8% in Taiwan (Speare 1974).
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Go, S., Park, KJ. (2019). Universal Public Schooling in Colonial Korea and Taiwan. In: Mitch, D., Cappelli, G. (eds) Globalization and the Rise of Mass Education. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25417-9_4
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