The Neutral Education Trap

Acknowledgements

This book is a short version of my PhD thesis (Wonseok Kim, 2018, A Critical Investigation into the Discourse of Educational Neutrality in South Korea (1987–2017), PhD Thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick). I would like to thank my supervisors, Cath Lambert and Claire Blencowe, for their support in helping me finish my PhD degree.

Chapter 3 was originally published in “Wonseok Kim, 2019, A critical look into the discourse of educational neutrality: The crisis of democratic education in South Korea, Asia Pacific Education Review, Vol. 20, pp. 305–314”. I thank Springer Nature for permitting the reuse of the article.

Prologue

Most ideas presented in this book go back to 2014, the year in which the Sewol ferry disaster took place. On 16th of April 2014, the Sewol ferry capsized off South Korea’s southwestern island of Jindo, and 304 people died. Of the victims, 250 were Danwon high school students on a school trip to Jeju Island at the time. At the scene of the accident, the ship’s captain and many senior crewmembers fled the sinking ship on the first rescue boat without taking proper rescue measures. Passengers aboard the ferry were only told to “stay still” (CNN, 2014).

Soon after the tragedy, a great number of people started wearing yellow ribbons or wristbands as a symbol of sympathy for the victims, of solidarity with the families of the victims, and of hope for building a better society. However, a few months after the Sewol ferry accident, the Ministry of Education (MoE) instructed schools to prohibit teachers and students from wearing the yellow ribbon at school, saying that “wearing the yellow ribbon is not only to violate the political neutrality of education but also to affect immature students who are vulnerable to biased perspectives” (MoE, 2014b, c). Despite the explanation of the MoE that they were concerned that the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union (KTU) would force students to wear the yellow ribbon for a political purpose (MoE, 2014b, c), the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has determined that the measure taken by the MoE infringed on freedom of expression (NHRC, 2015).

A similar controversy over the way of commemorating the Sewol ferry disaster arose in 2016. The KTU published the “4.16 Textbook for Memory and Truth” with the intention of using it as a reference book for the Special Lesson¹ for the second anniversary of the Sewol ferry disaster. However, the MoE again banned the use of the textbook on the grounds that it “not only encourages students to have a negative view of their country but also contains a distortion of the facts and non-educational expressions” (MoE, 2016). Lee Young, Vice-Minister of Education at the time, organised a meeting with Vice-Superintendents of Education where he insisted that “the Special Lesson using inappropriate materials will bring about social conflicts” and, above all, “it will undermine the constitutional principle of educational neutrality” (cited in Yonhapnews, 2016).

Against this backdrop, I was starting to wonder what educational neutrality or neutral education means and who prefers to use those words for what purpose. And in this book, as a revised version of my PhD thesis, I explore the situation in which critical thought and practice, which are essential for a democratic society, are considered unnecessary and even dangerous. The concept of educational neutrality has been widely used as a legitimate ground for getting rid of “the critical” in the field of education. For instance, teachers’ efforts to bring socio-political issues into their classroom are very often seen as “non-neutral leftist political acts” to incite students to become dissidents. Instead, teachers are urged to transfer “scientifically objective knowledge” to students. In addition, this book highlights the fact that the problem of educational neutrality has been raised by conservative forces for their political purposes to shrink space for critical thinking and action in the field of education, which mirrors the very Korean “war-political situation”.

In Chapter 1, “Proponents and Opponents of Neutral Education”’, I introduce contrasting approaches to the idea of neutral education. For example, whereas liberal neutralists claim that educational neutrality offers a reasonable ground to legitimise educational decisions, particularly those made by those in authority, such as teachers, critical pedagogues insist that education is a “socially embedded and historically located political project”, and thus there is no such thing as purely neutral education (Carr & Hartnett, 1996: 6). In Chapter 1, instead of assuming the impossibility of educational neutrality a priori, I suggest that we need not only to pay attention to the practical use of educational neutrality but also to see the problem of educational neutrality as a complex of socio-political practices rather than as a mere educational matter.

Chapter 2, “War-Politics and Neutral Education”, offers a framework for thinking about the Korean use of educational neutrality sociologically. I particularly draw on the work of Kim Dong-choon (2013) on “war-politics”. War-politics is a Korean conservative ruling force’s political strategy to treat political dissidents as internal enemies benefiting North Korea (communism) and, consequently, to harshly punish them in the name of protecting Korean society. By combining Kim Dong-choon’s work with Foucault’s later works on the relationship between war and politics (state racism), productive power mechanisms, parrhesiastic resistance and so on, I develop an analytical framework through which to investigate how neutral education works in favour of war-politics and how war-politics operates differently across time and space.

Chapter 3, “Neutral Education in Newspaper Editorials”, focuses on the ways in which non-neutral education is represented in newspaper editorials. By using critical discourse analysis that stresses the social use of language, I analyse what events and elements are combined in what ways for what purpose in the discourse of educational neutrality. The selected editorials were published by one of the most influential conservative daily newspapers in South Korea, the Donga-Ilbo, between 01.01.1987 and 31.12.2017.

In Chapter 4, “The Assault on Critical Teacher Unions”, is about the KTU, which is at the heart of controversy over educational neutrality. In South Korea, it is widely held that teachers should be “faithful” public servants, and they should not be politically partisan because they teach “immature” students who are vulnerable to politically biased views. In many cases, trade union activities in conflict with the state are thus deemed inappropriate for teachers. In this context, the KTU has been under constant attack by conservative forces. In Chapter 4, I investigate the multiple forms of power being exercised to destroy “non-neutral” critical teachers’ unions in the name of neutral education.