Do Korean schools promote the liminality of youth?

[Jules-상효]

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140713172148-97468280-do-korean-schools-promote-the-liminality-of-youth?trk=prof-post

Barak Obama, the president of the U.S. and whose administration inherited the No Child Left Behind legislation, has praised the Korean education system as something to which Americans can aspire. What aspects of Korean schools does he say Americans should aspire? Do Korean schools reflect any of NCLB’s or its supporters’ ideals?

According to my college professor Randall Wright, NCLB is “an example of the way that youth and risk are conflated, or joined to produce legislation and educational practice” and the world that risk discourse represents abhors ambiguity. Meanwhile “The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy” (http://www.thefullwiki.org/Liminoid). The dialectic implication I draw from this is that NCLB’s ideal is far from the promotion of the liminality of youth and it should probably have something in common with what Korean schools are like.

I think Korean education much remains in the modernism era in terms of the concept of the liminality of youth. The Korean word ‘청소년(chungsonyun)’ meaning ‘youth’ or ‘adolescents’ first appeared while Korea was colonized by Japan. Japanese government brought up young people matter in the pursuit of colonial policy to oppress people, which eventually contribute to form an image of the youth as those who are to be protected and controlled rather than as independent beings. People under the age 20 are categorized as another word ‘미성년(misungnyun)’ by law meaning ‘not adult yet’, which implies adolescence is regarded as more like an extended childhood in Korea. So, schools they go to should be protective places for those vulnerable people from wild jungle of society out there. This means, in other words, the youth are potentially risky if they are not properly protected and developed by schooling, which also implies teachers and other school personnel should be responsible for finding solutions to all the serious problems facing youth today.

However “by using the conceptual framework of liminality to gain additional insights into the process of schooling, students are viewed as agents who hold the generating source of culture and "future" structure” (Anfara, 1997). As Giroux (1984) reminded us, "School culture is really a battleground on which meanings are defined, knowledge is legitimated, and futures are sometimes created and destroyed" (as cited in Anfara, 1997). From this perspective, students “would be creatively engaged in the educational process, rather than passively accepting what is forced upon them by educational institutions” (Anfara, 1997). How about schools and students in Korea?

Borman and Spring (1984) suggest that “adolescence in modern society is a period of transition in which adult status is incrementally achieved. However, in the past days, schooling period wasn’t as long and children jumped into adulthood very early; they got married and started working. However, things have changed rapidly; schooling has gotten longer than ever, which created blurred period between childhood and adulthood. The transition to adulthood that young people are now experiencing is what the old generation never encountered; they did not have concept of liminality. The conflict occurs from that old generation expects young people to adapt to society as they did. Their notion of high school is a place where their children are equipped with necessary skills and knowledge before being in society in the future, which reminds of functionalists’ view on the purposes of schooling. Under this circumstance, students are required to show conformity and obedience to authorities, and youth culture is considered a kind of unnecessary or undesirable aberration by immature children. “The number of years spent in school is associated with the development of strong peer relationship” (deMarrais and LeCompte, 1999). However, in Korea young students’ peer relationship is sometimes monitored or interfered by parents and teachers. With adolescents regarded as an extension of immature childhood, school as an incubator of your culture and a promoter of liminality is denied. A rite of passage is sort of what should just skip or something during high school. As a result, many Korean youth are thrown unreadily into society and this is becoming a social problem, not to mention defiance and other youth problems.