‘Schools by and for Koreans’: Korean Immigrants’ Private Schooling Initiatives in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1906-1930

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper concerns the ‘education fever’ that marked the early Korean immigrant community’s private schooling initiatives in territorial Hawaiʻi (1898–1959). Drawing on the cases of two Korean private schools – the Korean Central School and the Korean Christian Institute – the paper examines the tensions and conflicts between white American missionary educators and Korean immigrant educators surrounding both the operation of the schools and the pedagogical practices deemed appropriate to the education of ‘Oriental’ students in the US imperial space. These two cases demonstrate that Korean immigrants in territorial Hawaiʻi were persistent and innovative in their efforts to appropriate Americanisation for their own national, communal and individual interests. Moreover, educators and parents challenged colonial educational practices by foregrounding how the Christian pedagogy of their private schools served to differentiate them from other (non-Christian) Asian immigrants, thereby legitimising their presence in white Protestant America.