Japanese Colonial Education in Korea 1910-1945

This study investigates the impact of Japanese colonial education in Korea. It examines how formal colonial education affected the attitudes and behavior of Korean students towards Japan's colonial domination of Korea. The lived experience of Koreans who attended school during the colonial era, beginning with primary school and ending with college graduation, forms the focus of this study. The seven individuals presented in this oral history project tell of their colonial educational experience and how they believe this experience affected their attitudes toward Japanese colonialism. Their account of this experience provides us with insight into the sociopolitical tension, at the personal level, created by Japanese colonial education. This study also provides fresh insight into the relationship that educational achievement has to nationalism. In order to gain a perspective on colonial education from the bottom up, questions such as the following were posited: (1) what motivated Koreans to attend government schools, (2) what were the socio-economic backgrounds of students who received a colonial education, and (3) what impact did colonial formal education have on student political consciousness. To gather this and other information that goes beyond that contained in established colonial literature the interviews were conducted within the framework of the following three questions: (1) did students' attitudes change according to the length of time they spent in school, (2) what influence did the family have on student political attitudes and what affect did colonial schools have in changing those attitudes, and (3) did the type of education a student received, i.e., academic or vocational, affect his perception of colonialism. These three categories were established less to get answers to specific questions than to derive a dense biographical discussion and narrative that then could be analyzed in depth. This study does not make a general statement about Japanese colonialism or colonial education in Korea. It does provide keen insight into the lived colonial educational experience of Koreans and the effects that such an experience had on their attitudes and behavior.

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