Modern education, textbooks, and the image of the nation: Politics of modernization and nationalism in Korean education, 1880-1910

This dissertation is an interpretive-historical-sociological study on the construction of a modern national identity in Korean education between 1880 and 1910. By reinterpreting the way that Korean reformers confronted the process of modernization/Westernization, the study challenges the "failure thesis" which maintains that subsequent Japanese colonization is an indication that the early modernization process in Korea was unsuccessful. In light of constructionist theories of modern education, nationalism, and the sociology of school knowledge, an analysis is presented of how education contributed to the development of modern nationalism in the period prior to Japanese colonization.;This study places the emergence of modern mass education in Korea in the context of a modern state-formation and nation-building attempt by the reformers, called here the "modernizers." The ideology of the "modernizers" is further studied with detailed attention to their social Darwinist interpretation of "Western modernity," and to their belief in modern mass education as a carrier of hope for the "future," which made education an important site for new constructions.;After Korea was made a "protectorate" by Japan in 1905, nationalism and Asianism, which formerly coexisted because of the modernizers' strategic need for political security against the West, clashed with each other as Japan became a "colonizer" in Korea. Seventeen textbooks in three subject areas (Korean language, Korean history and civics) are analyzed to determine their differing treatments of nationalism and Asianism in relation to modernization and to discuss the constructions of the outer and inner boundaries of the nation "recontextualized" in education. This study focuses on the particular way textbooks gradually reconstructed a sense of "cultural purity" in relation to the changing politics, and also constructed an ideological sense of "unity" out of actual "differences" in the society.;Although the perceived "modernity" was, in a sense, fundamentally "Western," the process of modernization in Korea did contribute to the construction of a "nation-for-itself," based on a simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic conception of politics. Modern education was not only coherent and crucial in this framework, but also played "constructive" roles through its politics of "recontextualization.".