Abstract
South Korean society in the late 1990s was confronted with socio-economic setbacks and discursive turbulence concerning the quality of education being provided. It was at such a particular historical juncture of South Korean society that I conducted ethnographic research on homeschooling families. Based on field data collected from four homeschooling families, this article examines how lower middle-class families at first manifested their education fever in an unprecedented adoption of homeschooling, and then returned their children to school within the same socio-cultural context. Central to this article’s analysis is what members of these middle-class families, especially children, experienced during the homeschooling period, and how parents negotiated their rationale for homeschooling and returning their children to school within contesting discourses (e.g., deschooling and neo-liberalism). As will be shown, despite experiencing difficulties in pursuing a self-fashioned education in a school-centered society, the families benefited from homeschooling in terms of acquiring “neo-liberal” mentalities for survival without risking their established socio-cultural status. As such, this article reconfirms the ambivalent characteristics of the alternative education movement in South Korea and its inevitable connection with the middle-class habitus embedded in the South Korean socio-cultural context.
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Notes
In South Korea, the term “education fever” is used in everyday life as well as in academic one. Despite controversy in articulating its definition academically (J. G. Lee 2005), in everyday life, it refers to the phenomenon of national obsession with education and parents’ aspiration and support for high educational attainment/achievement.
In this sentence, the term “liberal” signifies an order in which the state exists to secure the freedom of individuals on a formally egalitarian basis. See Brown (2003), endnote 6.
The term “emergent” is borrowed from the work of Williams (1981). He distinguishes cultural forms into “dominant”, “residual” and “emergent” ones (Williams 1981, pp. 203–205). While some innovations are movements and adjustments within the dominant culture which become its new forms, as Williams (1981, p. 205) points out, I thought that homeschooling as a cultural form is the “emergent” culture which struggles against the dominant one.
Interestingly, to the public su-yo-ja jungsim gyo-yug seemed to be a step toward the “democratization” of school administration in that it empowered parents and students who had been neglected to that point (Seo 2003). This ambivalent evaluation of the reform with an emphasis on autonomy and efficiency of education seems to correspond to that of alternative education.
Special purpose high schools, which originally started in the late 1970 s and focused only on art and athletics in an effort to complement the high school equalization policy, have expanded during the mid-1990 s in accordance with educational reforms, which emphasized “diversification, specialization, and autonomy” of schools. These schools had the special purpose of nurturing talents for the new economy, including technical, science, and foreign language skills. (Kim, Y. C. 2003).
Yeol-lin-gyo-yuk is a kind of progressive education for the purpose of promoting teachers’ and students’ autonomy and flexibility in contrast with the uniformity and rigidity of the curriculum and teaching methods of conventional education. However, some argue that yeol-lin-gyo-yuk confused teachers because it was enforced in a top-down way by the government.
To my surprise, Brown (2003), drawing upon Lemke’s interpretation of Foucault’s neo-liberal rationality, articulates my discussion more elaborately like this, “neo-liberalism normatively constructs and interpolates individuals as entrepreneurs in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for “self-care”—the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions.”
“Penetration,” which was coined by Willis (1977, p. 119) is meant to designate “impulses within a cultural form toward the penetration of the conditions of existence of its members and their position within the social whole.” Homeschooled children as participants of this study penetrate the cultural conditions and meaning of schooling in South Korea through homeschooling adventures.
As noted by Habermas (1981), education is one of the “autonomous realms of the life world,” that needs to be prevented from being colonized by the system or the market and the state.
In this sentence, “becoming together” means nurturing each other and sharing awakenings with one another.
In line with this trend, major newspapers in South Korea, unlike in the initial stages of homeschooling, began to represent homeschooling as an effective and short-cut method to become one of the “elite” (Seo 2006).
In the wake of the first public hearing on legalizing homeschooling in the National Assembly in August, 2003, in March 2005, an amendment of elementary and secondary education law was passed with new articles stating that dae-anhag-gyo (alternative school) is legalized as gag-jonghag-gyo (“other schools”) without any guarantee to support the schools financially and to approve the academic careers of graduates from schools in South Korea. Also, a second hearing on the legalization of homeschooling was held in January, 2007, with the enforcement ordinance for establishment and administration of alternative schools announced officially in June, 2007, and the guides for self-regulation of schools passed through in April, 2008. Despite the prevalence of the ostensible autonomy of education and the attenuation of collectivistic “schoolism,” all these steps of the government might not guarantee the right to defend the autonomous realm of education from the system (the market and the state) but “the right only to signify, to consume, and to choose” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, p. 330).
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This study was supported by research fund from Chosun University, 2008.
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Seo, DH. The profitable adventure of threatened middle-class families: an ethnographic study on homeschooling in South Korea. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 10, 409–422 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-009-9036-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-009-9036-x