Education as Citizenship, or Citizenship by Education

Abstract

© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.South Koreans citizenship in the nations social institutional order, economic development, cultural life, and democratic politics has been decisively facilitated and shaped by their participation, competition, and struggle in public education. South Koreans educational fervor has both bolstered and been intensified by these societal transformations. In citizenship terms, education has critically enabled South Koreans to march into modern institutional, developmental, political, and scientific/cultural citizenship. In a great paradox, however, South Koreans access to education itself has remained quite dubious as a citizenship right. The virtual universalization of tertiary education at colleges and universities came about under the private payment of tuitions and other school expenses. Most adolescents attain college/university diplomas not as a citizenship right but as a parental gift. Under the recently worsening economic inequalities, such parentally buttressed high education is increasingly unsustainable and tends to distort public education into an exclusionary class affair.