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This paper examines the formation of the teachers' movement in South Korea, focusing on the publication of the short-lived magazine "Minjung Gyoyuk" (People's Education) in 1985. Progressive teachers published this magazine to systematically critique the education practises of the time and seek a new direction for education under repressive conditions, which led to dismissals and arrests of the contributors. This incident became central to the formation of the Korean Teachers' Union (KTU) in 1989, which emerged in the milieu of compressed growth and the struggle for democratisation. By looking at the cultural notions of shame as a source of struggle, the paper examines the complexity of political and social values inherent in the progressive movement, undergone in the process of compressed modernisation and democratisation.

The Black Lives Matter campaign has led many people around the world to reassess monuments that are installed in public spaces to commemorate historical figures. These reassessments raise questions about what it means to attack the statues of the past, what the rights and wrongs of such actions are, what this teaches us and how all this is passed on to the next generation. In line with this, I focus on a statue of the former dictator of Korea, Chun Doo-hwan, installed in 2019. The purpose of the statue was, however, somewhat different from that of many other statues currently at issue. It was erected for the purpose of humiliation rather than respect. By examining the case of the statue of Chun Doo-hwan in Korea, this paper discusses the nature of democracy in relation to these attacks on statues. In particular, it attempts to interpret the installation of the statue as a form of art for an emancipated community, where democracy is understood as involving a haunting of the collective memory. It concludes that democracy is something never to be grasped fully, something that slips away from its intentions and that is always to be tested and reconsidered. Finally, the paper addresses the educational significance of the statue in question in terms of how history is to be taught and how, in our interactions with the statues around us, the past is to be remembered.

This paper presents an analysis of the ways in which the concept of educational neutrality is used in South Korea. It focuses in particular on the discursive use of educational neutrality. Drawing on selected editorials published by the Donga-Ilbo, I explore complex interlinkages between linguistic and socio-political elements that constitute the discourse of educational neutrality. The findings are that the Korean use of educational neutrality is related not only to the war-political context in which critical engagement in social and political issues is treated as a subversive political act but also to the neoliberal restructuring of education. The paper concludes by outlining some implications for democratic education.

The major purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which multiethnic Korea and Thailand are cultural democracies. The primary conceptual framework guiding this study is the powerful but largely ignored concept of cultural democracy. Bereday's classic model of comparative research is another major theoretical and methodological framework utilized. The major methodologies used are comparative qualitative case studies, meta-synthesis, and participant-observation. Comparative national case studies are rare. A number of striking similarities between the two countries are identified. The very low fertility rates of both nations drive a critical need for guest workers and international students. Both countries in general have pursued assimilationist policies not conducive to cultural democracy. The final part of the paper offers suggestions for strengthening cultural democracy in both nations. Their long-term potential can be enhanced if both these societies recognize the 'diversity advantage' and move actively to realize the ideal of cultural democracy.

This study explores the implications of the flipped classroom experiment in South Korea as a counter-proposal for the school innovation project based on the Korean educational context. Using Dongpyung middle school in South Korea for this case study, this paper focuses on how and why the flipped classroom impacts Korea's education culture. The results of the experiment provide significant insights, such as promoting more active classroom learning and the improvement of student academic achievement. In particular, the narratives of the students and teachers in the flipped classroom experiment show the following positive impacts on learning and teaching: (1) Transformation into a more equal and democratic classroom, (2) restoration of enjoyment in learning and teaching, (3) improvement of self-confidence, and (4) inspiration for the learning and teaching community. Based on these results, this paper discusses possible implications of the flipped classroom as an alternative future class model in Korean society.

Democratic citizenship education in the information age must concern itself with the goal of nurturing future generations with the capacity to make appropriate use of the changes driven by the advances of ICTs so as to activate political and social democracy. Using Australia and South Korea as case studies, this paper discusses the role that citizenship education can and/or should play in producing democratic citizens in the information age. This paper analyses and compares the recent curricula and educational policy developments in citizenship education in Australian and South Korea. More specifically, the paper attempts to identify what implications the advances of ICTs have and what future tasks they impose for the field of democratic citizenship education. (Contains 6 endnotes.)

The University of Evansville, like many universities, requires a seminar for all incoming first-year students to prepare students for college-level writing, along with the reading and discussion of challenging texts. Often, these courses share particular books to allow in-coming students to share a "common experience." This article discusses how Matthew Knoester's first-year writing-intensive seminar class explored the topic of competing definitions of "democracy," focusing on the topic "Perspectives on Democracy." Drawing from the book "On Democracy" by Robert Dahl (1998), and the constitutions of five different countries (France, Ireland, Kenya, South Korea, and the United States), along with guest lectures from scholars from each of the countries outside of the United States named above, students compared how "democracy" appears to be defined from country to country. One of the guest speakers for the class, the second author of this essay, detailed how she was involved with the movement for democracy in Kenya, and offered a valuable perspective from a politically active citizen within a movement that helped to create the first democratic constitution in her nation's history. The lecture that Wangari Gichiru gave to the class via Skype is included in this paper.

In recent decades in Korea, many significant changes in political, social and cultural dimensions have been held by the citizen's initiative, where the revitalization of citizenship and strong civic unity have played a role. Yet, in regard to the characteristic of Korean citizenship, it seems that the aspect of individual subject has not been fully matured or issued; that is, there is a dissymmetry between the strong civic unity and a weak individual subject. This paper attempts to explore a possible historical account of why this has been the case by examining the historical development of the concept of enlightenment in modern Korea and Japan. 'Enlightenment', as a modern concept in Korea, was imported via Japan in the period from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century as in many other new concepts such as 'democracy' or 'nation'. However, by comparison to the Western idea of the Enlightenment, its modern concept, Korean or Japanese, developed a different meaning in each own context, while lacking its original meaning essential to the creation of the 'modern individual subject' as a 'citizen'. Hence, in modern Korea and Japan, the word 'enlightenment' is regarded as a historical concept with no contemporary relevance.

The context for this paper is the rapid globalization and international migration occurring across the globe. An insightful metaphor for this era is "the death of distance." The influx of new migrants into countries such as Korea, Japan, Thailand, and the United States presents many challenges for those societies. In Minnesota, people of Karen culture from Myanmar (Burma) are arriving daily and the state currently has over 100,000 individuals of Hmong ethnicity. With its incredibly low fertility rate (lowest among OECD countries), Korea is necessarily needing to import large numbers of workers from diverse countries of the Asia-Pacific region such as Vietnam and the Philippines which presents many challenges for Korean educators and policy-makers. In the first part of the paper as background, the different genres of people moving across national borders are carefully differentiated. Among the major groups are so-called "gastarbeiter" (guest workers) and those working in another country for a defined period, actual migrants (legal and illegal), and various kinds of refugees and/or those seeking political asylum. In this paper, the focus is on permanent migrants. In the early 1970s, Ramírez and Castañeda developed the important construct of "cultural democracy" which unfortunately was largely ignored. The US government's focus, for example, has been on fostering political, not cultural democracy with many adverse effects. The concept of "cultural democracy" is far more relevant today than when it was developed. Cultural democracy is a key theoretical construct used in this paper. Other key theoretical constructs used are social contact theory developed by Allport and subsequently researched extensively by Thomas Pettigrew; the Protean individual developed by the political scientist, psychologist Lifton; and the important construct of intercultural competency. Drawing upon these four important theoretical frameworks, a model for effectively integrating new migrants in Korea is proposed for consideration and review.

Comparing popular education in the Philippines and South Korea, it is clear that a number of similarities and differences exist regarding the characteristics, methods, and main fields in which popular education has operated. "Church-related practices," "uniting with CO movements," "an elite-led tendency," and "a disregard for the Left" have all occurred in similar ways in both countries. While introducing the socio-political situation during 1970s and 1980s of these two countries, this paper discusses the theories and practices of popular education. Our findings indicate how popular education in both countries has played a significant role in raising the levels consciousness in the powerless and transforming societies and enabled them to establish a better community. Moreover, each country developed different concepts, initiatives and methods in relation to popular education. In addition, popular educators have been asked to play different roles in each popular education field while most methods were in fact heavily dependent upon elite-led practices. (Contains 17 notes.)

This paper views seeking the optimal balance between state strengths and the scope of state functions for "good governance" as the formation of a homogenization-heterogenization matrix of policy initiatives in different social settings. Homogenization refers to a global tendency for institutional changes and governance framework to change state capacity, while heterogenization refers to the local adaptation of these global transformations. The paper attempts to take educational decentralization as an example of policy initiatives to assess and analyse the significance of the two opposite poses in four East Asian newly industrialized economies (NIEs) (Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan). The paper's position is that it may be useful to see these four NIEs as making up two clusters. It sees political democratic transitions in Korea and Taiwan as important local factors affecting the developments of educational decentralization in the two societies, while reforms in Hong Kong and Singapore seem to be more consequences of managerial and market values. However, the NIEs face the question of how to maintain sufficient "stateness" in the decentralization process. To conclude, the paper considers that achieving the balance of "stateness" is the key to success in state-building.

While the ideas of Western democracy and individualism are increasingly popular and influential in Korean society, the traditional Korean understanding of authority has been challenged, especially in Korean schools. In this essay, the author first tries to analyze some important educational problems in contemporary Korea as it relates to the problem of authority. The paper, then, examines Dewey's ideas on authority and their connection to education and discusses what significance Dewey's view of authority might have on Korean education today. The author argues that Dewey's thoughts on education are especially applicable to contemporary Korea, a land in which there has been an upsurge in democratic aspirations in both society and education during recent decades.

This paper focuses on the historical review of neo-liberalism in Korean education with relevance to human rights education and teachers movement. In transition to post-colonial society, Korea confronts polarization of education. From the first stage just after the independence from Japanese Colonization in 1945 to the fifth present stage, Korean education has expanded so quickly and the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened. Thus stakeholders of educational reform have been divided according to the political stance of neo-liberalism. One of the strongest stakeholders, Korean Teachers Union (KTU) has to redefine its historical role as transforming agent for the educational reform, because KTU had impacted on the educational solidarity for the peace, human rights and democracy education in terms of Chamkyoyook since its inauguration in the 1990s. (Contains 1 note and 2 tables.)

Discusses the reasons for the rapid growth of the Korean economy and the social and political implications of this growth. Assesses recent student riots and middle class unrest and offers insights into the political future of the country. (GEA)