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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines how Japanese colonial authorities, Western missionaries, and Korean nationalists pursued overlapping yet often conflicting agendas for industrial education, and explores how these colonial tensions shaped South Korea's postwar technical education.

Paper long abstract

This presentation explores industrial education in Korea under Japanese occupation and its postwar legacies under the developmentalist military dictatorship. Various groups of actors were involved in shaping education during colonial times, and their efforts both intersected and diverged in revealing ways. The official colonial education system in Korea under Japanese rule laid strong emphasis on industrial and vocational education for Korean children to fit its broader objective of assimilating a colonial workforce that was loyal and could be employed in Japanese industries. Koreans were actively discouraged from pursuing higher education outside technological fields such as agriculture and engineering. Western missionaries also advocated industrial education through their schools, which existed long into the colonial period and strove to teach Koreans practical skills to edify their hearts and make them amenable to western style capitalism. While colonial and missionary approaches to industrial education frequently overlapped and reinforced one another, Korean nationalists pursued industrial education for fundamentally different objectives: to strengthen the country's economic base and lay the foundations for future independence.

Drawing on Korean writings, missionary reports and journals, as well as official colonial documents, this presentation argues that conflicts between these groups invariably emerged when Koreans asserted their own agency and vision for industrial education. The presentation furthermore explores how these various strands of Korean educational history intersected and at times challenged one another, and examines how their legacy shaped postwar South Korean educational policy and cooperation with its former colonizer Japan during the Park Chung-hee era.