Efficiency and governance: The case of South Korea

Abstract

School education in Korea has prioritized excellence and efficiency above all else since the founding of the Republic of Korea in the 1940s. Excellence and efficiency were pursued through standardization and competition. Some examples are the national curriculum, national guidelines for assessment and records of students’ grades, and the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test). Under the circumstances, regional and local education offices and schools were primarily interested in excellence and efficiency. However, due to the adverse effects of the powerful central government and its national standardization and efficiency policy in the past, the pendulum has swung to equality and the wellbeing of students. Nowadays, the central and regional governments push for a policy to convert autonomous high schools to standardized general high schools. The change has triggered severe ideological and political conflicts between the camps throughout Korean society, with one emphasizing standardization and efficiency, and the other stressing equality and the wellbeing of students. Is there truly no way to resolve the conflicts between excellence/efficiency and equality/wellbeing in education? This is one of the most important and fundamental problems at the root of Korean education policies today.