Cultural Imperialism and English Education in Korea

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

According to Giroux(l981, pp. 78-79), schooling is a form of ideological apparatus that functions both to "sustain and resist" the values and norms of the dominating classes. When Korea was under Japan's colonial rule during the first half of the twentieth century, Korean schools, especially private schools founded by nationalists played this ambivalent role in the given political condition. While being forced to teach the students to assimilate themselves to Japanese culture and to become agents of colonial domination, the schools were the locus to develop the critical consciousness that can loosen the hold of colonial power and strengthen the national struggle against Japanese colonialism. After the nation's independence, on the contrary, the schools have been under the continuance of military dictatorship no more than an agency for the encroachment of new imperial forces, the United States in particular. The reason for this changed role of schooling in the postcolonial age lies partly in the unilateral evaluation of what the United States has done to Korea. Many right-wing politicians and conservative intellectuals who have maintained political and cultural hegemony stress the fact that the United States has delivered Korea from Japan's colonial domination and also has protected Korea from the communist invasion in the Korean war. Yet they have never questioned the responsibility of the United States for the national division and for the continued support of Korean military dictatorship. Korean people thus came to regard the United States as a guardian of freedom and peace, as a country for which they ought to be always grateful. This is why Western cultures including English language and literature have been embraced without any conflict or refusal on the part of Korean people.
Recently, however, the movement of educational reform led by the Teachers Labour Union creates a new era of schooling in Korea. Although more than thirteen hundred teachers involved lost their jobs as the result of governmental suppression, they continue to struggle for the realization of "true education," believing that the structural contradictions of Korean society sterms from absurd educational system. What they attack is not only the current pedagogy and institutions but the underlying concept of education itself. Their ultimate aim is to demystify the false consciousness or "bad faith" imposed by the repressive social structure, and to raise what Wood (1985) called "critical literacy" which refers to "the process of helping students have critical awakening about their social and political realities and resist against an attempts to perpertuate marginalization of their position" (McCathy, 1990, p. 113). Not surprisingly, the program the teachers suggest as an alternative for "true education" includes a reinterpretation of English literature and Western cultures from a Korean point of view, They question themselves what kind of connection exists between English literature as a product of foreign culture and socio-political realities in Korea, and why and how the mind of Korean intellectuals have been subjugated by the discourse of cultural imperialism implicit in the formalist tradition of English literature.
This self-examining project, this revisionist approach to Western cultures by the Teachers Labour Union is, in fact, in harness with the emergent movement of National Literature. Those involved in national literature maintain that Korean literature, unlike its Euramerican counterpart, is inseparable from such existing social conditions as economic inequality, regoinal antagonism, political backwardness, and national division. At the same time, they also emphasize that the national literature of Korea must be in line with Third World literature so as to challenge the hegemony voice of Eurocentrism in the age of neocolonialism. What they purport is a reversal of perspective, a shift from the marginalization into the centralization of Korean literature. For them, English is not the language any longer, but a language just as Korean is one. They are aware of the fact that, unless Korean cultural identity is established, multiculturalism is nothing but a cultural synchronization. This is why they consider the ultimate of Korean intellectuals in the postcolonial age to be the accomplishment of decolonizing the mind.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• CONTENTS
• Ⅰ. INTRODUCTION = 1
• Ⅱ. ENGLISH EDUCATION IN KOREA = 4
• Ⅲ. CONCLUSION = 10
• Ⅳ. BIBLIOGRAPHY = 11