Cultural policy and development in Korea

Abstract

Although the importance of interfacing development with culture had long been recognized by policy makers and development planners, analysis of national develoment plans and activities shows that many developing countries have not accorded to culture a central place either as an object or an instrument of development. Korea has not been an exception to this. The typical thinking among the early policy planners in fact was that traditional values and institutions have placed too much emphasis on the spritual, cultural aspect of a person or society to the point of disregarding and even neglecting the material needs. The backwardness of the nation owed, they believed, much to the overemphasis upon the spiritual and cultural value at the expense of the material well-being of the people. The materialistic culture of the west on the other hand was assumed to have enabled their societies to develop rapidly through industrialization.