Globalizing Future Citizen: Curriculum Reforms and Citizenship Education in South Korea

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Educational Change: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Educational Reforms Across and Beyond National Boundaries

Abstract

From the late twentieth century onward, global interconnectedness has been growing in many parts of society, including education. One of the common features in recent educational policy innovations is an effort to globalize the curriculum. This research tries to untangle the phenomenon of globalizing curriculum reforms in S.Korea from 1953 to 2012. In analyzing the national curriculum reforms, this paper will discuss how the meaning of 'global citizenship' is understood and implicated into school knowledge, as well as the struggle and contradictions between the will to nurture a global, and at the same time, patriotic future citizen.
Korean education reforms in the late twentieth and early twienty first century targeted two goals: continuous externalization of American education system and enhancement of global awareness and international competencies. By focusing on global citizenship education, these national education innovations sought ways to modernize and globalize the citizen. During the 8 national curriculum reforms for the past 60 years (1953-2012), the image of the ideal citizen has been reshaped to a global citizen, which emphasize certain knowledge such as English, Math, and Science. Furthermore, these subjects gained more authority by national and international student achievement tests including PISA. Thus, certain school knowledge gained more power and they became standards to judge students’ academic achievement. The globalizing of curriculum reforms and their use of standardized test rested its epistemological base on a westernized idea of modernity, trust in science, and on the comparability of educational achievement.
The finding of this research shows that the curriculum reforms followed by government turnovers continuously redefined the meaning of global citizen according to the era’s political ideal. As a way to provide new mode of living, national curriculum reforms have changed and fabricated the ideal type of citizenship. The gaps between global and national, written curriculum document and everyday practice ask us to rethink what do we mean by global citizen.
Using Jürgen Schriewer’s comparative education theory (1992, 2000a, 2000b) and Edward Said’s traveling theory (1983, 1994), I will discuss Korea’s practice of borrowing global educational reforms, which created an ideal child that travels internationally and into Korea. Also, Michael Foucault's notion of governmentality (1978) will be used to explain the reasoning of national education reforms to fabricate and discipline its citizen for future. To discuss globalization in terms of modernity and comparability, I will also discuss Eisenstadt's multiple modernity (2000).
As a data, I used Korean national curriculum documents, curriculum guides for teachers, document published by Ministry of Education and OECD national reports on PISA. By using document analysis, this paper will reveal educational reform as a continuous will to produce future global citizen, which excludes certain groups of students as not their ideal human. Through studying the case of Korea, this research will provide a chance to look back on these days’ slogan of globalizing education and suggest what do we mean by global citizen as our ideal educated human.

Author

• Ji-Hye Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison