Success and Education in South Korea

Abstract

ment in Japan has become widely known,1 and South Korean students have recently achieved the highest mean scores in science and math in the International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP) administered by the Educational Testing Service to 13-year-olds in 19 countries, with Taiwanese students having achieved second highest.2 This international success is well known in South Korea, having been widely reported in the media, and has become a source of national pride. It is not immediately apparent why children in South Korea and Taiwan should be so successful in science and math. Neither subject is a traditional strength of East Asian intelligentsias, and educated Koreans often respond to questions about South Korean students' mastery of math by noting that none of the world's famous mathematicians have been East Asian. Lip service has been given to scientific and technical education since the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948, but the actual emphasis in educational planning up until the 1970s was citizenship educationinculcating loyalty, patriotism, self-reliance, and anticommunism. Even the ideology of modernization introduced in the early 1960s focused on spirit rather than technology. In-su Son has characterized the educational policy of Huii-s6k Mun, minister of education and culture during the Democratic Party Government of 1960-61, thusly: If modernization is realizing humanity by making daily life more rational, then the spiritual aspect of modernization is even more important than the material, and the spiritual must precede [the material], if only in stages ... human propensities and the structure of consciousness must be reconstructed as the driving force of social reform.3 Serious and sustained special attention to scientific and technical education came only in 1973