State, Class, and Expansion of Education in South Korea: A General Model

Abstract

Few economists, sociologists, or educational researchers have failed to make the point that educational development was critical for the achievement of rapid economic growth in resource-poor South Korea. Generally, researchers approach the contribution made by education in terms of its production of skilled workers and its propagation of the values instrumental in modernizing economic and social structures.' Based on the human capital perspective, these studies take the educational system as given and are primarily concerned with its consequences for the economy; they often overlook the political and economic contexts that affect the expansion of education within a society. Our premise is that educational expansion is driven not only by the economy's need for increasingly specialized labor but also by the interaction between the state and class. This interaction may shape the expansion of education in ways that do not fit human capital considerations. Our objective is thus to examine the effect of particular combinations of state and class forces on the expansion of South Korean education at three levels from 1945 to 1988. Our results can be