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Word Count: 1,130

Insights on Education in South Korea as Institution and asIndustry

A REFLECTION PAPER

Introduction

The film begins as an undivided Korea rises from the ashes of theWorld War II, unshackling itself from Japanese rule in 1945. Even then,Koreans already had this thirst for knowledge, amidst the ruins and rubble ofwar. However, this yearning for normalcy to undertake a national educationprogram was set back with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.Beginning 1953 when major hostilities between the North and the South hadceased, the new nation of South Korea embarked on a 50-year journey

beginning the early to mid-1950s to where it was in year 2000. Instead oftrying to determine what was in store for Korean education for the decade2001 to 2010, for purposes of this reflection paper, the time horizonshall now be re-dated to 2011 to 2020.

Education as a Social Institution

As an undivided peninsular nation prior to the 18th century, Koreathrived as a kingdom with strong Confucian precepts. In this society, theeducated individual was most respected, and in fact cornered the best jobsin the old civil service system. This age-old tradition of esteem for education

was carried into the 20th

century, so much so that as war ravaged thecountry, first in WWII and then during the Korean War, a starving Koreanpopulation would trade some of its meager resources (which was alreadybarely enough for food) for the chance to send their children to makeshiftclassrooms and earn an education, though humble as it was at that time.

This became the chief mode of upward social mobility, meaning theKoreans believed in the ability of one individuals education to totally lift himout of his current station in life. A case in point in the movie was a ladyfarmer scrimping on her meager earnings to be able to send her children toschool, making a determined promise not to see her children end up asfarmers, just like her.

But more importantly, Koreans saw education as a social institutionthat would singlehandedly engineer the economic turnaround of a rural, war-torn country into a prosperous and self-reliant nation belonging to a globalcommunity. This was borne out of its ugly memory of Japanese occupation,which collectively made South Korea even more determined to makeeducation a centerpiece of its national growth strategy.

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Education as an Industry

It would be useful to analyze the South Korean system of educationusing the framework developed by Michael Porter, referring to The FiveForces that Shape Industry. For this paper, let us focus on three of the five:

BUYERS, SUPPLIERS and the DYNAMICS OF COMPETITION.

The Buyers, in this case, would be the companies and organizations(both local and abroad) as well as the South Korean government that employthe graduates produced by the education sector. TheSuppliers would be theindividual Korean families that send their members to schools and traininginstitutions, and even the Korean government that similarly invests insending its citizens.

A confluence of the two brings about the Dynamics of Competition,where we see graduates of schools and training institutions competing for a

finite number of available jobs in the market, and in return their viability foremployment depending on their level of education or training and its fit vis--vis the requirements of that job. This is further constrained by the entry offoreign workers offering similar circumstances, as well as the decliningnumber of jobs in a particular segment of the labor market if the companiesor organizations in that labor segment move towards employing moremachines or products of technology.

To begin with, any investment by the South Korean government inproviding education for its people was assured ahigh return oninvestment (profitability) because this became the primary means for its

citizens to move from low income to higher income jobs.

The average Koreans competitiveness lay in the fact that the entirepopulation enjoyed guarantees to universal primary education (6 years inelementary), plus the added encouragement from government who saw to itthat secondary education would be an increasing priority over the years:from a mere 30% of Koreans finishing high school in the 1950s to anincredible 100% by the 1990s. The net effect of this was a large mass ofhighly-educated Koreans, able to cater to the requirements of a steadyincrease of high-income jobs as the Korean economy, and which such higherincomes spurred even more growth.

Add to this the shift from a traditional view of allowing masses ofKorean women to remain uneducated to freeing up the schools to take themin, further widening the pool of available individuals ready for the jobsmarket. Plus, this had the added benefit of contributing to the populationcontrol efforts of the government because it was able to better reach child-bearing Korean women and inform them on family planning methods.

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