Description

Increasingly today, individuals and states take stock of how other people educate their children. South Koreans have long looked to the U.S. as an educational other – a gaze that came to new life as more and more children and families joined a project of educational exodus beginning in the late 1990s and peaking in the first decade of the 2000s. Interestingly, in recent years South Korean education has become an object of the U.S. gaze and seems to be President Obama’s favorite educational other. But the picture is not so simple: just as the U.S. has long debated educational equity and achievement so too has South Korea. And recently Finland seems to be on everyone’s map as the “happy alternative.” I examine how these gazes reveal the very complicated landscape of thinking about class, social mobility, and social justice in South Korea today. I also introduce a middle school student, Alex (and his mother), to showcase the family-level experience of South Korea’s internal educational debate.

Nancy Abelmann is Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She writes on family, class, gender, education, and migration with a focus on South Korea and Korean/Asian America.